The dispute goes to the heart of Lindon, Utah-based SCO’s legal claims against Linux and IBM Corp, and while the dismissal of Novell’s motion appears to be good news for SCO, it also means that the debate over Unix copyright ownership should eventually be settled once and for all.
SCO launched its slander of title claim against Waltham, Massachusetts-based Novell in January 2004 after Novell publicly disputed SCO’s claim to own the patents and copyright to Unix System V and the UnixWare operating system.
Novell sold UnixWare to the Santa Cruz Operation Inc in 1995 but claims to have retained the rights to Unix and UnixWare. Caldera Inc later acquired Santa Cruz Operation’s Unix business before changing its name to SCO Group and launching its intellectual property crusade.
Novell’s second motion to dismiss SCO’s slander of title claim was prompted by an apparently positive response from Judge Dale Kimball to its first request to throw out the case, although he rejected it having concluded that the arguments about the agreements at the heart of the case would be more properly heard on potential later motions for summary judgment or trial.
There is enough ambiguity in the language of Amendment No 2 that…it is questionable whether [it] was meant to convey the required copyrights, wrote Judge Kimball at the time, prompting Novell to use his words in a second attempt to get the case dismissed on the grounds that SCO could not prove it had acted maliciously.
The judge appears to be determined to settle the argument once and for all, and has rejected Novell’s second attempt. Even though Novell argues that it has evidence to support its alleged good faith basis for claiming ownership of the Unix copyrights, the proper place to introduce that evidence and argue its significance is not on a motion dismiss, he wrote. Novell argues that based on the court’s prior ruling, the issue of who owns the Unix copyrights is not obvious and Novell therefore cannot be held to have acted with malice in asserting its opinion on that issue. However, the court’s prior order would not preclude a finding of malice after fact discovery is complete.
To have dismissed SCO’s lawsuit on a legal technicality based on the definition of malice might have brought an early end to the case, but would have left open the question as to which company owns the copyright to Unix, a significant issue given SCO’s ongoing cases against IBM Corp, AutoZone Inc, and Red Hat Inc.
SCO claims that IBM breached contract by contributing Unix code to the Linux operating system and that AutoZone breached its copyright during a migration from Unix to Linux. Based on its claims of copyright ownership, Novell has claimed to have waived any SCO contractual rights violated by IBM.
