1. SCO vs Novell

In 2004, Santa Cruz Operation (SCO) filed a Slander of Title lawsuit against Novell and asked that the courts assign all of that company's UNIX copyright registrations to it saying that it owns the source code for the UNIX operating system, including portions of Linux. SCO sought to have the court declare that it owned the rights to the UNIX code, including the copyrights.

SCO said the rights were part of an asset-transfer agreement the parties had entered. Novell claimed that the asset-transfer agreements did not transfer the intellectual property rights SCO looked for. Novell further asked the Court to find that SCO had breached the agreements by signing UNIX license agreements with Sun Microsystems and Microsoft without paying Novell the agreed percentage of those agreements.

Novell was found to be the owner of the UNIX copyrights, and SCO was found to have breached the asset-transfer agreements. The court announced the verdict in its favour.