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Yesterday a jury returned its verdict in the seven-year legal battle between SCO Group and Novell: SCO does not own the copyrights to UNIX and, by extension, they cannot demand licensing fees from companies that use Linux.

Huh?

Let’s explore the case. Back in late 1995 Novell sold Unix to The Santa Cruz Operation, SCO’s predecessor. The contract was confusing as to who actually owned the copyright for the code. SCO claimed that it was the rightful owner — or if it wasn’t, it should be as a result of the sale. Eight years later, SCO sued IBM, claiming IBM included bits of SCO’s copyrighted UNIX code in its version of Linux. Novell disputed that claim, saying that it owned the copyrighted code and it was just fine with Novell if IBM used it in Linux. (Still with me? Good.)

Three court cases enused. SCO lost the first in August 2007 when a Utah federal judge ruled that SCO didn’t own the copyrighted code. However, SCO sorta won when the Tenth Circuit ruled last August that the issue of who owned the copyrights needed to be settled by a jury. Hence the decision yesterday.

Despite its 1-2 won-loss record in this case, SCO isn’t giving up. According to The Salt Lake Tribune:

“As for SCO, [Edward] Cahn [the trustee running SCO as part of its bankruptcy proceedings] said the company would discuss what the ruling means for its Unix business. He pointed out that presiding U.S. District Judge Ted Stewart still has parts of a verdict to render that will affect the case’s final outcome. For example, Stewart is being asked to rule whether Novell still needs to transfer the copyrights to SCO as part of the sales contract and whether Novell had the right to waive SCO’s claims against IBM. ‘We still have claims against IBM irrespective of this verdict,’ Cahn said.”

The takeaways?

• Whenever you buy something really big or expensive, always take the time to read the fine print. (I’m looking at you, eBay.)

• SCO’s sole line of business appears to be litigation. (Look for the highlighted words.)

• This is a big deal for Linux and open source software, but will go unnoticed by almost everyone.

They’re falling like dominoes at the annual Pwn2own event this year in Vancouver. Some really smart scary guys have managed to hijack Windows 7 PCs via Firefox and IE8 (snort) and a MacBook using Safari. Two of ‘em even hacked an iPhone and downloaded its database of SMS messages. (Yoikes!)

Google Chrome is the last browser standing. It’s not perfect, but has proved once again much harder to exploit. Having said that, I do agree with PC World’s article, Security Lessons Learned from Pwn2Own Contest:

“… the browser is the new Achilles heel of security regardless of the hardware or software platform.”

UPDATE, March 26: Nobody even tried to hack Chrome on day 2 of Pwn2own.

Actually that’s not quite right — google.cn now redirects to www.google.com.hk, the uncensored version of Google based in Hong Kong:

“We believe this new approach of providing uncensored search in simplified Chinese from Google.com.hk is a sensible solution to the challenges we’ve faced — it’s entirely legal and will meaningfully increase access to information for people in China. We very much hope that the Chinese government respects our decision, though we are well aware that it could at any time block access to our services.”

For those of you who are indeed waiting for that other shoe to drop, Google has created a China service availability dashboard.

It was Weekend Update time a couple of days early yesterday as YouTube-Google and Viacom fired point-counterpoint blog posts at each other in their ongoing (never-ending?) copyright infringement suit.

Viacom opened with a pithy statement about the facts of the case:

“YouTube was intentionally built on infringement and there are countless internal YouTube communications demonstrating that YouTube’s founders and its employees intended to profit from that infringement … Google bought YouTube because it was a haven of infringement … The law is clear that Google and YouTube are liable for their infringement. The Supreme Court unanimously held in Grokster that a service that intends infringement is liable for that infringement. No case has ever suggested that the [Digital Millennium Copyright Act] immunizes rampant intentional infringement of the sort Google and YouTube have engaged in.”

(Could you say “infringement” one more time, please, in case somebody out there didn’t get it?)

YouTube’s counterpoint can be boiled down thusly:

“With some minor exceptions, all videos are automatically copyrighted from the moment they are created, regardless of who creates them … The issue in this lawsuit is not whether a video is copyrighted, but whether it’s authorized to be on the site. The DMCA (and common sense) recognizes that content owners, not service providers like YouTube, are in the best position to know whether a specific video is authorized to be on an Internet hosting service. Because content owners large and small use YouTube in so many different ways, determining a particular copyright holder’s preference or a particular uploader’s authority over a given video on YouTube is difficult at best. And in this case, it was made even harder by Viacom’s own practices. For years, Viacom continuously and secretly uploaded its content to YouTube, even while publicly complaining about its presence there. It hired no fewer than 18 different marketing agencies to upload its content to the site. It deliberately ‘roughed up’ the videos to make them look stolen or leaked. It opened YouTube accounts using phony email addresses. It even sent employees to Kinko’s to upload clips from computers that couldn’t be traced to Viacom … Viacom’s efforts to disguise its promotional use of YouTube worked so well that even its own employees could not keep track of everything it was posting or leaving up on the site. As a result, on countless occasions Viacom demanded the removal of clips that it had uploaded to YouTube, only to return later to sheepishly ask for their reinstatement. In fact, some of the very clips that Viacom is suing us over were actually uploaded by Viacom itself. Given Viacom’s own actions, there is no way YouTube could ever have known which Viacom content was and was not authorized to be on the site. But Viacom thinks YouTube should somehow have figured it out. The legal rule that Viacom seeks would require YouTube — and every Web platform — to investigate and police all content users upload, and would subject those web sites to crushing liability if they get it wrong.”

(Both Viacom and YouTube have figured out that in the legal biz, if the other side does something more than once, you call it “countless”.)

Now over to Viacom for the last word:

“The statements by Google regarding Viacom activities are merely red herrings and have no relevance on the legal facts of this case.”

Here’s the good news: the Droid took off faster than the iPhone. What I mean to say is that it took the iPhone 74 days after it hit the streets in June 2007 to reach 1 million units sold. Droid sales over the first 74 days of its life were 1.05 million units. Congrats!

Now about the other thing. Um, the Nexus One appears to be a bust — only 135,000 sold in the first 74 days.

Link via Flurry.

Web Domains

Today’s the 25th anniversary of the first .com registration. And no, the registrant wasn’t IBM (March 19, 1986), Apple (February 19, 1987) or even Microsoft (May 2, 1991). It was Boston-area AI firm Symbolics.

According to Wired, only 5 domains were registered in 1985. Once the Web was invented, domain registrations skyrocketed. And a mere 22 years later icanhascheezburger.com was born.

Fandango Mobile Tickets

Airlines have been testing cellphone-based paperless tickets for a couple of years now. Now Fandango’s testing mobile movie tickets in 8 U.S. markets — all of ‘em *not* Philly, btw. (What’s so special about Houston? They were the first city in which mobile airline boarding passes were tested. Now they’re in the first Fandango test group. Sheesh.)

Google vs. Apple

The NY Times gives us a good overview of the deteriorating relationship between Apple and Google. The following quote …

“It’s World War III. Amazing animosity is motivating two of the most powerful people in the industry. This is emotional. This is the biggest ego battle in history. It’s incendiary.”

… pretty much sums up the tone of the piece. (So does the URL for the story: 14brawl.html.) Anyway, it’s all about the mobile market.

Google vs. China

Not content with merely taking on a company that qualifies as a small country, the Big G has also decided to take on #3 on the world list. I refer to China. After calling them out on spying charges back in January, Google is real close to deciding to pull the plug on Google.cn. That means Chinese users who manage to circumvent the Great Firewall will get unfiltered content. And that makes the Chinese authorities real twitchy.

The USPTO has concluded its reexamination of Amazon’s “1-Click” patent and has confirmed it:

“As amended, claims 1 and 11 now positively recite ‘a shopping cart model’.”

(Dramatic, huh?)

Anyway, Amazon isn’t out of the woods on this one yet. The U.S. Supreme Court has agreed to hear the Bilski case, which concerns whether business methods can be patented. If the court rules against them, 1-Click could be toast anyway.

ReadWriteWeb reports on a recent head-to-head test of Flash vs. HTML5 video. The results? “Flash isn’t always a CPU hog, sometimes that honor goes to HTML5.”

Flash works best when it can take advantage of hardware acceleration. This is generally not a problem under Windows, so in many cases Flash actually runs more efficiently than HTML5. This is one of the benefits of living in the Windows world, which is run by a Putin-esque dictator who sees the big picture and wants to work with other countries in order to enhance his own power.

Linux and Mac OS X are another story, however. Due to the Balkanization of Linux, it doesn’t have a standard API for Adobe to use for video hardware acceleration. Thus, Flash is going to hog CPUs for the forseeable future. (Which is why I have to use Flashblock on the linux laptop on which I am now typing. Otherwise it slows to a crawl and I have to fight the urge to fling it against the wall.)

The Dear Leader of Mac OS isn’t interested in anyone else’s economy. He wants to control every aspect of his own, which (he’s convinced) will lead to world domination. So he treats hardware acceleration as a state secret:

“Apple isn’t allowing Flash to become more efficient on their Mac OS X/Safari platform (or their iPod/iPhone/iPad one, either) by not providing the access to the hardware it needs to reduce its CPU load … In blocking Flash on Apple devices, the company can easily claim that it’s simply not an efficient technology … and that’s true for now, considering how it’s set up. But if the company wanted to allow it and make it work, it seems reasonable to believe that they could. This is what leads some insiders to believe that the decision to block Flash is less of a technological one and more of a business-minded one. After all, if you could easily visit Hulu.com to stream TV shows and movies, then why would you need to buy them from the iTunes Store?”

That’s for the wifi model. The 3G version will hit the street by the end of April. You don’t actually have to camp out at the Apple store — you can preorder online staring March 12.

As I said when the Kindle launched, the iPad doesn’t make economic sense to me. That said, I’d never refuse one if it were offered to me.

Link via NYT.

BoingBoing reports on a suspected ATM-skimmer who swallowed a USB flash drive containing incriminating data while he was being arrested by the Secret Service. After 4 days with zero throughput, doctors had to remove the device. (I swear I thought of that before I read the comments on the BB post.)