A federal appeals court on Monday ruled that the SCO Group has a right to a jury trial on its claim that it owns the Unix operating system. The ruling could lead to renewed legal entanglements for Unix's open source cousin, Linux.

The 10th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals reversed a lower court judge who had ruled against SCO in 2007, a decision that suspended an aggressive legal campaign by the company.

In 1995, SCO Group (then known as Santa Cruz Operation) bought the Unix operating system from Novell for $149 million. But which company owned the copyrights wasn't clear, and years of litigation ensued. SCO Group filed for bankruptcy two years ago after a Utah federal judge said SCO Group – considered a Utah-based copyright troll by the open source community – was not the owner despite the $149 million deal.

While the case ground through the courts, SCO Group tried to collect licensing fees from some 1,500 corporate Linux users, claiming that portions of Linux are based on Unix, and thus violated SCO Group's copyrights. Novell did not make a similar claim.

Monday's ruling could revive SCO's separate high-stakes lawsuit against IBM. SCO Group is seeking more than $1 billion from Big Blue on allegations it used SCO-copyrighted Unix code in its Linux-based systems. The case was sidelined after the Utah federal judge said SCO group didn't own the copyrights at issue.

Still, the copyright fight is far from being settled.

The appellate court, without taking any sides, ordered a jury trial to determine whether SCO Group properly owned the Unix and UnixWare copyrights. The court, in short, said the case was too close to call without a trial.

"We take no position on which party ultimately owns the Unix copyrights or which copyrights were required for Santa Cruz to exercise its rights under the agreement," the court wrote. "Such matters are for the finder of fact on remand."

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