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How Not to Get Snookered by Claims of "Proof" of Copyright Infringement

By Pamela Jones et al.

I guess you heard that Florian Mueller is at it again. He made strong claims of a smoking gun regarding alleged copyright infringement of Oracle files by Google. Well, in the cold light of day, some of the media who printed it without fact checking are now awakening to the news that the news wasn't as reliable or unchallengeable as they assumed.

You'll find corrections now, notably from Ed Burnette at ZDNet, who is a programmer-journalist, and by Paul Ryan at ars technica. That is what journalists are supposed to do, if they see wrong information. It's part of the ethics of being a good journalist, and the other part is to issue corrections when the mistake is your own. To their credit, many journalists have now corrected what they wrote initially.

However some continue to print that that it still means something horrible about Google and the predictions of Google's doom are still in the air. And of course, Florian never quits, so he promises more.

When Florian sent his article around, he sent it to me also. Would you like to know why I didn't write anything about it then? Because I believed that even if every fact in it was true, it didn't prove anything legally about copyright infringement in connection with this lawsuit, and editorial judgment is very much part of being a journalist. Does that surprise you? Let me explain a little about US Copyright Law, then, and you'll see how to know when a claim of copyright infringement is just an initial working theory, or even FUD, and when it's actually a fact. That way you can avoid being snookered by premature claims if they ever happen again.

Because, my friends, I gather this is SCO II, the attacks on Android. It is Linux, after all, at its core, and the same M.O. that we endured in SCO I -- the bold claims to the media of copyright infringement, analysts popping up to "confirm" the claims, etc. -- are starting up again. Remember all the wild claims by SCO about how IBM was doomed, how they had a mountain of evidence already? Remember all the headlines? All the analysts supporting SCO's claims? Notice anything familiar now that everyone is going after Google? All right. SCO II. We'll have to go through again. So let's get started.

Full post as published by Groklaw on January 23, 2011 (boomark / email).