USL V. BSDi Background USL's Complaint Pretrial External Links

The suit has its roots at the Computer Sciences Research Group (CSRG) at the University of California, Berkeley, which had a license for the source code of UNIX from AT&T's Bell Labs. Students doing Operating systems research at the CSRG modified and extended UNIX over the course of several years. With AT&T's blessing, the CSRG made the first of several releases of the modified operating system in 1978 -- the Berkeley Software DistributionBerkeley Software Distribution BSD is the name of the UNIX derivative distributed in the 1970s from the University of California, Berkeley. The name is also used collectively for the modern descendants of these distributions. History AT&T Bell Laboratorie. Because the system contained copyrighted AT&T source code it was only available to other organizations with a source code license for UNIX.

Later, students and faculty would audit the software code for the TCP/IP stack, removing all the AT&T material, and license it to the public in 1988 as NET-1 under the BSD licenseThe BSD license is the license agreement that the BSD software (largely, a version of UNIX) is distributed under. The owner of the original BSD distribution was the " Regents of the University of California". This is because BSD originally came from the U. When it became apparent that the Berkeley CSRG would soon close, students and faculty began an effort to remove all the remaining AT&T code from the BSD and replace it with their own, and effort that resulted in the 1991 release of NET-2 to the public under the BSD license. NET-2 contained code for nearly an entire UNIX-like system, which the CSRG believed contained no AT&T copyrighted software.

BSDi obtained a copy of NET-2 and filled in the missing pieces as well as portingIn computer science, porting is the adaptation of a piece of software so that it will function in a different computing environment to that for which it was originally written. Porting is usually required because of differences in the central processing u it to the Intel i386IA-32 sometimes generically called x86 or even x86-32. Within various programming language directives it is also referred to as " i386"; this directive would inform the compiler to generate code only for the IA-32 instruction set. It is the instruction se computer architecture. BSDi then sold the resulting BSD/386 operating system. This drew the ire of AT&T, whose Unix System Labs subsidiary filed suit against BSDi in New Jersey in April of 1990. The suit was later amended to include The Regents of the University of California.

2 USL's complaint

On these grounds, USL asked the court for a preliminary injunctionAn injunction is an equitable remedy in the form of a court order that either prohibits or compels ("enjoins" or "restrains") a party from continuing a particular activity. The party that fails to adhere to the injunction faces civil or criminal contempt that would bar BSDi and the UC Berkeley from distributing the NET-2 software until the outcome of the case was known.

Many of the trial documents of this case are sealed or unavailable, including the majority of those submitted by USL. Some of those that are available have had portions removed as a term of the case settlement.

3 Pretrial

Since the allegedly infringing software had been released to the public by the UC Berkeley, most of the case would hinge on the events there. Because UC Berkeley was not originally a party to the suit, the University made its arguments against an injuction in a series of amicus briefs.

The University submitted the licenses UC Berkeley had from AT&T for UNIX, which specifically stated that the copyright on the Berkeley software built upon the 32V version of UNIX belonged to the University. They went on to claim that AT&T had confirmed this by allowing the free redistribution of NET-1 , as well as allowing the distribution of the later BSDs, in which specific source code files were marked as containing no AT&T code and so freely redistributable. Since allowing this distribution was legally considered abandoning the copyright, that code could not have been considered a copyrighted part of UNIX even if AT&T had not explicity said it wasn't.

Assuming this was true, the University would still have to show that NET-2 did not contain any validly copyrighted AT&T UNIX code. One claim the University would make was that USL's copyright in the 32V version of UNIX that NET/2 was based on was invalid. At the time 32V was released, US copyright law did not automatically presume that a released work was copyrighted. In order to claim copyright, it was necessary to include copyright notices in the work -- which 32V did not have -- or to register the work with the government. Because AT&T didn't register the copyright on 32V UNIX until 1992, the grace period for registering an already-released work had expired.

The University also claimed that identical and similar lines of source code (which were presented during discovery) did not infringe on USL's copyright because they had become public domain by AT&T's own actions. AT&T had promoted UNIX as a standard, licensing it to universities and allowing UNIX source code to be published and documented in books. The University submitted briefs from the UC Berkeley students and staff, explaining how they'd audited the code by looking for freely available copies of the source code and methods. When they could find none, they said, they removed the code and rewrote it using publicly know techniques -- and so any remaining similarities existed because USL's had effectively abandoned the copyright to them.

The University would also argue that the source code did not infringe because it was necessary for program compatibility -- that certain code could be written only one way and still be compatible with the standards set by organizations like POSIX and AT&T itself, and so was no longer a "creative" work that could receive copyright protection under the law.

Even if the code were validly copyrighted AT&T UNIX code, the University claimed, that would not be a copyright violation because it made up such a small fraction of the whole of NET-2 that it could not legally be considered a derived work.

4 External links

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1 Background

2 USL's complaint

3 Pretrial

4 External links

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