Waltham

A federal appeals court on Monday reversed a judge's decision that granted the copyright of the Unix computer operating system to Novell Inc.

A three-judge panel of the 10th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that a judge erred in August 2007 by granting the copyright to Novell. The panel ordered a trial to determine ownership.

Novell, a software and computer infrastructure company, has been locked in a yearslong legal battle with The SCO Group Inc. of Lindon, Utah, over ownership to the copyright.

SCO said the ruling paves the way for resumption of the court case.

He's one of the most popular users on Twitter. More than 500,000 follow his growing celebrity, his every adventure and, well, his cat naps.

Meet Sockington. Twitter's latest star is a microblogging cat who regales more than half a million with his musings on meal time, personal hygiene and the view from the top of the stairs.

Despite the slide in global economic conditions, Verizon Wireless says it intends to deploy a 4G wireless network in the United States, beginning in 2010.

To make this happen, the nation's largest wireless carrier has tapped Alcatel Lucent and Ericsson to serve as the primary vendors of infrastructure equipment based on a high-speed wireless technology called Long Term Evolution (LTE), said Dick Lynch, executive vice president and chief technology officer at Verizon Wireless.

San Diego-based Websense Inc. was deemed a front-runner in the data leak prevention market by top-tier industry research firm Forrester Research. In its second quarter 2008 report on DLP released this month, Cambridge, Mass.-based Forrester ranked Websense and Reconnex Corp. of Mountain View highest across 74 criteria, including market presence and product offerings.

Websense, with corporate headquarters in Sorrento Valley, is an integrated Web, messaging and data protection company. It employs 1,200 workers.

Microsoft's aggressive campaign to increase its position in digital advertising took another step this week as it announced the acquisition of Navic Networks, a television advertising provider. Terms were not disclosed.

The deal, announced Tuesday, will give the software giant ownership of Navic's sophisticated campaign-management tools for digital advertising. Those tools optimize where and when interactive television ads are placed. One tool, called Admira, offers a unified ad network so that selected audiences can be targeted across all ads in a campaign.