SCO group--formerly known as Caldera Systems

In 2003, the SCO group--formerly known as Caldera Systems--filed a $1 billion lawsuit in the US against IBM claiming that they had, without authorization, contributed SCO's intellectual property to the codebase of the open source, Unix-like Linux operating system.

Fast forward to 2007 where we discover in the latest March 7th hearings that out of the bajillion lines of GPL code in the Linux kernel, only 326 lines of code are said to be an issue. Furthermore, most of those lines are #define statements that specify abbreviations.

And just what is a #define statement? It's a statement that says "take this value, and assign it to this label." It's done so that when writing software, programmers can avoid using those values directly and instead use the labels.

Let's get back to SCO. Claiming these abbreviations, or shorthand, are copyrightable, is like trying to claim a copyright on abbreviating 10 Cir, when referring to the 10th Circuit Court of Appeals which is where this case will likely end up. That is, if SCO doesn't go bankrupt first.