A Salt Lake City jury on Tuesday ruled against SCO Group's claim it owned the copyright to the Unix operating system, a cousin to the popular open-source OS Linux.

The verdict came seven months after a federal appeals court said the bankrupt SCO group deserved a jury trial on the hotly contested issue of who owns the copyrights. After a three-week trial, the jury said Novell retained the rights to the operating system, despite a highly complex 1995 deal between SCO Group and Novell.

The case is important in the open source community. While the litigation ground through the courts, SCO Group tried collecting 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 and has repeatedly said it had no intention of suing anybody for copyright infringement.

Ron Hovsepian, Novell president and CEO, said "This decision is good news for Novell, for Linux AND for the open source community."

"Obviously, we're disappointed in the jury's decision," said Stuart Singer, SCO's lawyer. "We were confident in the case, but there's some important claims remaining to be decided by a judge."

He said that, despite the jury's ruling, he would request that U.S. District Judge Ted Stewart give the copyrights to SCO Group.

The tortured history of the flap began in 1995, when 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 with Novell. Despite bankruptcy, the SCO Group continued its battle to win the copyrights.

Still, the lower court's decision suspended SCO Group's aggressive licensing-fee-collection campaign the company was hoping to revive after a successful jury trial. That trial was born after the 10th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in August ruled SCO Group had a right to a jury trial based on its claim that it owns the Unix operating system.

The appeals court reversed a lower court judge who had ruled against SCO in 2007, the same decision a unanimous federal jury reached late Tuesday. The appellate court, without taking any sides, ruled the case was too close to call without a trial.

The jury's Tuesday decision, if it withstands appeal, guts SCO Group'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.

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