SCO has adjusted its copyright claims against Linux. They used to claim that millions of lines of source code were directly copied. Now their claiming its more like Vanilla Ice vs David Bowie and Queen.

Why SCO Thinks It Can Win: McBride: A lot of code that you'll be seeing coming on in these copyright cases is not going to be line-by-line code. It will be more along the lines of nonliteral copying, which has more to do with infringement. This has more to do with sequence, organization, which is copyright-protectable. It's interesting when you go down this path that everyone wants to go to the exact lines of code, but most copyright cases... McBride: …are not line-by-line, exact copies. It's too obvious. Most copyright infringement cases come from these nonliteral implementations of the same code or literary work. Sontag: My favorite example is the Russian author [Dmitry Yemets], who lost in a copyright case [after being sued by] J.K. Rowling, author of the 'Harry Potter' books, in a Dutch court. He had written a book: It was a girl, not a boy, with magical powers who rides a magical fiddle and not a broom, goes to a boarding school to learn witchcraft and wizardry, plays a game of throwing balls through hoops. All these things were very similar to Harry Potter. Could someone else ever write a book about wizards and witches? Sure. But when the structure and sequence is the same…maybe the words, the code, isn't exactly the same, but Linux is trying to be just like Unix System V. The question is whether Linux was trying to be like Unix System V by doing it in ways that were illegal. ...McBride: I saw it, it was published, so the cows are out of the barn. The analogy I like to use is Vanilla Ice's "Ice Ice Baby" versus David Bowie and Queen's "Under Pressure." If you just look at the words, I don't see a copyright violation, but if you listen to the riffs, you can hear where they're the same. Editor's Note: Vanilla Ice settled out of court presumably because his song included riffs that had been taken from Bowie and Queen's work. See Copyright Website LLC for more on the issue. McBride: When everything is said and done, when everything is on the table in the court case, there will be an argument when the Linux guys come in and say, 'Guys, the words are entirely different, how can you say that's a copyright violation?' But there are two parts to this. There are the words that are in the source code, and there's the music underneath. The actual code that drives these ABI files is structurally and sequentially the same.