Federal district judge Dale A. Kimball issued a ruling on Friday declaring that Novell owns the UNIX copyrights. Kimball's ruling means that the end is near for SCO's protracted litigation trainwreck, an epic assortment of lawsuits that have achieved infamy in the tech industry. Judge Kimball finds that Novell never transferred ownership of the UNIX copyrights to SCO during or after a 1995 agreement between the two companies.
Judge Kimball's ruling effectively ends SCO's "slander of title" lawsuit against Novell, which was based on SCO's allegation that Novell had wrongfully claimed ownership of the UNIX copyrights. Since Novell is the rightful owner of the UNIX copyrights, "there is no basis in the evidence before this court for finding that Novell's public claims of ownership were a misappropriation or seizure of SCO's property," said Judge Kimball in his 102-page ruling.
Confirmation of Novell's ownership of the UNIX copyrights will also put an end to SCO's lawsuit against IBM, in which SCO alleges that IBM infringed on UNIX copyrights by incorporating proprietary UNIX code into the open-source Linux operating system. Judge Kimball has determined that, under the terms of Section 4.16(b) of the 1995 Asset Purchase Agreement between the two companies, Novell has the authority to "direct SCO to waive its purported claims for breaches of [UNIX] license agreements with IBM and Sequent."
http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20070812-sco-never-owned-unix-copyrights-owes-novell-95-percent-of-unix-royalties.htmllol.. i give them 2 years to fold.. TOPS.
