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According to its company blog, Novell Inc. of Waltham has won a legal dispute over whether it or The SCO Group owns the copyright to the UNIX operating system. The jury in the trial in the District Court of Utah found that Novell is the rightful holder of the copyright.
The now-bankrupt SCO claimed that Novell had sold it the intellectual property rights to UNIX in the 1990s. It used that claim in 2003 to bring suit against IBM Corp. for using parts of the UNIX code in its version of Linux. Novell disputed SCO’s ownership, and in 2007 a judge ruled in favor of Novell. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Tenth Circuit overturned the judge’s ruling in 2009, paving the way for a jury trial to settle the matter.
According to the website ArsTechnica, SCO is not allowed to continue with its infringement suit against IBM or other Linux users, since it doesn’t own the copyright to the code it claims is infringing.
According to an article in the Salt Lake Tribune, the trustee handling the bankrutpcy for SCO Group said he was “deeply disappointed” in the jury finding, and SCO will, in fact, continue its lawsuit against IBM.
In its blog post, Novell said “Novell is very pleased with the jury’s decision confirming Novell’s ownership of the Unix copyrights, which SCO had asserted to own in its attack on Linux. Novell remains committed to promoting Linux, including by defending Linux on the intellectual property front.”
Earlier this month, Novell’s board decided to reject an unsolicited $2 billion takeover bid from Elliot Associates LP, a company stockholder, saying that the offer — $5.75 per share in cash, which amounts to about $2 billion from its more than $347 million shares outstanding — is inadequate and “undervalues the company’s franchise and growth aspects.”
Novell’s 2009 annual report saw Novell’s network software business drop in its fiscal 2009, while its open source-based product line continued to make up a larger part of the company’s revenue.
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