The SCO Group has been ordered to pay Novell Inc. more than $2.5 million in royalties in a dispute over the Unix computer operating system.

Wednesday’s award by U.S. District Judge Dale Kimball falls short of the nearly $20 million Novell was seeking. Nonetheless, SCO said it might appeal.

SCO originally brought a lawsuit against Novell in 2004 alleging slander of title. SCO asserted Novell hurt SCO’s business and reputation by denying that Novell sold SCO ownership rights when it allowed SCO to take over the business of servicing Unix technology in 1995.

Novell countersued for license royalties. Kimball ruled last August that SCO didn’t acquire ownership rights to Unix when it bought the licensing and development rights from Novell in 1995. That paved the way for Wednesday’s award.

In a move that signals a possible thawing of Google Inc’s relations with Hollywood, its YouTube unit has reached a deal to feature film clips from Lions Gate Entertainment Inc on the video-sharing site.

Google Chief Executive Eric Schmidt announced the deal at an Ad Age/William Morris Agency conference on Wednesday and said it would give viewers access to scenes from their favorite Lions Gate movies, accompanied with ads.

Lions Gate later confirmed the deal.

“There are things in our library like ‘Dirty Dancing’ that have been watched tens of millions of times and it will be nice to get paid for that and to set viewers in the direction of buying movies,” Lions Gate Vice Chairman Michael Burns said in a phone interview.

Lions Gate, also home to the popular “Saw” horror movies and Oscar winner “Crash,” would appear to be taking more of an “if you can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em” approach towards YouTube.

This is in sharp contrast to media giant Viacom Inc, owner of Paramount and MTV Networks, which has sued Google and YouTube for $1 billion, accusing them of copyright infringement by enabling unauthorized viewing of its shows like “The Daily Show” and “The Colbert Report.”

Web retailer Amazon.com Inc will introduce a new online store of TV shows and movies on Thursday, called Amazon Video on Demand, The New York Times said.

Customers of Amazon’s new store will be able to start watching any of 40,000 movies and television programs immediately after ordering them because they stream, just like programs on a cable video-on-demand service, the paper said.

The service is different from most Internet video stores, such as Apple’s iTunes and the original incarnation of Amazon’s video store, which require users to wait as video files are downloaded to their hard drives.

Amazon could not be immediately reached for comment.

Amazon has also struck a deal with electronics giant Sony to place its Internet video store on the Sony Bravia line of high-definition TVs, the paper said.

Amazon would pursue similar deals with other makers of TVs and Internet devices, Bill Carr, Amazon’s vice president for digital media, told the paper.

Amazon Video on Demand will be accessible to a limited number of invited Amazon.com customers on Thursday before it opens more broadly to other users later this summer.

Have you ever wanted to know the name of admin@gmail.com? Now you can.

Through a bug in Google calendars the names of all registered Gmail accounts are now readily available. All you need to find out the names of any gmail address is a Google calendar account yourself. Depending on your view this ranges from a harmless “feature” to a rather serious privacy violation. According to some reports, spammers are already exploiting this “feature”/bug to send personalized spam messages.

Blind people generally use computers with the help of screen-reader software, but those products can cost more than $1,000, so they’re not exactly common on public PCs at libraries or Internet cafes. Now a free new Web-based program for the blind aims to improve the situation.

It’s called WebAnywhere, and it was developed by a computer science graduate student at the University of Washington. Unlike software that has to be installed on PCs, WebAnywhere is an Internet application that can make Web surfing accessible to the blind on most any computer.

The developer, Jeffrey Bigham, hopes it lets blind people check a flight time on a public computer at the airport, plan a bus route at the library or type up a quick e-mail at an Internet cafe.

Money problems will likely force NASA to abandon its ambitious internal goal of having a new moon spaceship ready by 2013, a top space agency official told The Associated Press Wednesday.

The agency should still be able to meet its public commitment to test launch astronauts in the first Orion capsule by March 2015, the official said, unless national budget stalemates continue.

But the agency’s own hurry-up plan to get the job done even earlier - with a first crew launch by 2013 - will “very likely” be changed during meetings this week in Houston, said Doug Cooke, NASA’s deputy associate administrator for exploration.

“We’re probably going to have to move our target date,” Cooke said in a phone interview. An actual astronaut moon landing is still set for 2020. Orion initially will just orbit Earth before

The team that founded Apache’s Maven project has joined Eclipse to marry their popular framework and repository with the Eclipse platform and projects.

Engineers from Sonatype, the corporate backers of Maven, have also joined the Eclipse board, where they’ll play a part in the open-source group’s architectural direction. Sonatype has become a strategic member.

Jason van Zyl, Apache Maven founder and also founder and chief technology officer of Sonatype, told The Reg he’d lobby for his Java build-and-release framework and repository to be integrated with the next version of Eclipse, due in just under a year. The idea is for Sonatype’s Maven plug in for Eclipse, M2Eclipse, to ship with Eclipse 3.5 - a first version of M2Eclipse is due by the end of September.

On Monday, Symantec opened two of its Norton 2009 products to public beta. Both Norton Internet Security 2009 and Norton Antivirus 2009 feature new code that not only makes the scans and services run faster, but consume fewer system resources, says Tom Powledge, vice president of consumer product management.

As an example, Powledge said that where Norton Internet Security 2006 consumed roughly 300MB of hard-disk space, the 2009 version is coming in around 100MB. Symantec has achieved this, in part, by reducing a number of redundancies introduced over the years. For example, previous versions of NIS contained multiple copies of the antivirus signature database.

For antivirus protection, faster and lighter has been achieved by focusing only on the files that have changed. As hard drives fill with digital photos and songs–files that typically do not change–Norton is able to mark them as trusted and then ignore them on subsequent scans. Powledge says this results in big gains in speed, reducing the time it takes to scan large drives.

Also, in order to keep up with the ever-changing malware loose on the Internet today, the 2009 products with be updated every 15 minutes or so with new signature files.

The Wii Remote is getting in touch with its sensitive side.

Nintendo unveiled Wii MotionPlus at the E3 Business and Media Summit on Tuesday. The new accessory plugs into the base of the Wii Remote and will provide more intuitive motion controls. Wii MotionPlus is scheduled for release in spring and will come packaged with “Wii Sports Resort,” which will feature beach-themed activities such as frisbee throwing and jet skiing.

A Brooklyn man was sentenced to 30 months in prison on Tuesday for sending spam e-mails to more than 1.2 million subscribers of America Online in a scheme that foiled the Internet company’s spam-filtering system.

Adam Vitale, 27, was sentenced in federal court in Manhattan after pleading guilty more than a year ago to breaking anti-spam laws. He was also ordered to pay $180,000 to AOL in restitution.

Vitale was caught making a deal with a government informant to send junk e-mails — known as spam — that advertised a computer security program in return for 50 percent of the product’s profits, prosecutors said.

“Spamming is serious criminal conduct; this is not a teenager engaging in child’s play,” U.S. District Judge Denny Chin told Vitale as he sentenced him. Vitale earlier apologized and said he had learned a lesson.

Delver.com today unveiled an alpha version of the first true social search engine. Delver maps a user’s social connections then delivers comprehensive Web search results ranked according to their social relevance to that user.

Delver, based on the user’s search query, organizes and ranks publicly displayed content, found on social networking profiles, web sites, blogs, bookmarks, and photo and video sharing sites from the user’s online social network. A ‘breadcrumb’ is shown next to each result, showing how that result is related to the user, thus qualifying its relevance.

“Delver is designed to ‘delve’ into your online social graph to generate search results gathered from your friends, your network and your friends’ networks, to help you find information more relevant to you as an individual,” said Liad Agmon, CEO of Delver. “We prioritize results based on your network to make Web search more fun and meaningful, while enabling you to discover others in your extended network who share common interests.”

Delver also gives users the ability to tap into the content and network of people whose opinion they value by adding them as ‘Search Buddies’. Delver prioritizes results from ‘Search Buddies’ and their network as if they were the users’ friends. Furthermore, Delver provides a number of features for organizing and retaining the information found as a result of a search query. When results are yielded, user’s may choose the “keep it” option, which stores the selected links in the appropriate categories for compiling lists or easier reference later on.

Though Delver.com is in an early stage of product development, it demonstrates the great potential and necessity of social search. Delver currently covers Myspace, Blogger, Flickr, LinkedIn, Youtube, Hi5, FriendFeed, Digg and Delicious; other sources, such as Facebook and the top blogging platforms will be added to the service over the next few months.

Consumers may be tightening their belts, but that reduction apparently hasn’t affected DVD sales just yet. In fact, spending on DVDs and Blu-ray discs during the first half of 2008 showed a slight increase over the same period a year ago, according to data collected by Home Media Magazine. Spending on rentals rose even more, indicating that perhaps part of consumers’ money-saving efforts involve cozying up to a movie at home for entertainment instead of heading out for a night on the town—or downloading from the Internet.

Home Media found that sales of DVDs and Blu-ray discs rose from $6.8 billion in early 2007 to $6.87 billion in the first half of this year—a modest increase of 1.1 percent. This number appears to coincide with “studio reports” saying that unit sales were also up 1.1 percent to 412.3 million discs in the first half of 2008, according to the Hollywood Reporter. Rentals increased by 2.6 percent, from $3.7 billion to $3.9 billion.

Analysts seem to think that these numbers also serve as proof that downloading—legal or illegal—is not hurting DVD sales as much as Doomsdayers would like to think.