That pitch has been enough to raise $19 million for the Pasedena, Calif.-based company, and now it has added another $9 million in a round led by Comcast’s venture capital arm. Earlier investors Idealab, Rustic Canyon Partners, Tribune Company and Trinity Ventures have all re-upped as well.

Perfect Market‘s main offering is a service that hosts big publishers’ old stories in a Google-friendly way, and sells ads against the archived content. The very short pitch: Why let Demand Media and its ilk get all the search ad dollars?

Things are getting more interesting now, though, as the company rolls out analytics and a dashboard that is supposed to help writers and editors figure out how to make the stories they’re writing now make more money in the future, via SEO-like tips.

And they’ll get very interesting down the road, as Perfect Market gives writers and editors the ability to help choose stories that are more likely to generate ad revenue down the line.

That’s either cunning or creepy, or maybe both, but the company isn’t there yet. It has been testing a version of its analytics package with the Tribune-owned Orlando Sentinel, and says it is working on a 2.0 version of its software for release this year. We’ll check back with the company later on….

“We’re either right or we’re not. If we’re wrong, we deserve people throwing rocks at us.”

– Former SCO CEO Darl McBride in 2003

SCO’s long-running campaign against Linux may have finally been dealt a death blow. Late Thursday, the judge presiding over the company’s legal battle with Novell (NOVL) rejected its request for a new trial and upheld an April jury decision that determined Novell, not SCO, is the rightful owner of key Unix copyrights.

“SCO argues that it is entitled to judgment as a matter of law because the ‘verdict cannot be squared with the overwhelming evidence and the law,’” Judge Ted Stewart wrote in his decision. “The Court respectfully disagrees. The jury found Novell’s version of facts to be more persuasive. This conclusion is well supported by the evidence. There was substantial evidence that Novell made an intentional decision to retain ownership of the copyrights….Therefore, SCO is not entitled to a new trial.”

So it seems that after seven years, this charade by SCO is finally over. What will it tell the bankruptcy court now? Earlier this year, former U.S. District Judge Edward Cahn, the company’s bankruptcy trustee, told the Salt Lake Tribune that the jury decision will not dissuade it from pursuing its lawsuit against IBM (IBM). Said Cahn: “The copyright claims are gone, but we have other claims based on contracts.”

Thursday’s ruling would seem to be a setback for those plans, but SCO has a history of pressing on in the face of repeated defeats. We’ll have to wait to see if one of its Iraqi Information Minister-style press releases is forthcoming.

In any event, the stoning has begun on Wall Street, where SCO stock is trading around five cents a share.

The stunt is designed to promote “Southland,” a new cop drama that debuts on GE’s (GE) NBC tonight. The fake “story,” which runs on the bottom-left column of the page, follows one of the show’s characters on a “ride-along” through LA.

The (not very good) lede: “It’s not every assignment that puts you in the back of a squad car, especially one that gives you a true glimpse into the hearts of the heroes behind the badge…”

Here’s what it looks like in print:

Like the New York Times ads, this might have seemed controversial several years ago, when newspapers weren’t shaking the couch cushions to try and find spare change. Now it’s just inevitable, especially given that Tribune Co., the LAT’s corporate parent, has already filed for Chapter 11.

Tellingly, the ad doesn’t show up on the homepage of the LAT’s Web site (though there is a review that calls the pilot “strangely bland”). If  you want people like me to write about an Internet ad, it’s got to be truly interesting, like the Apple (AAPL) campaign that ran earlier this year.

UPDATE: The embattled editorial staff of the Los Angeles Times, which has endured round after round of cuts, isn’t as blase about this as I am. They’re circulating a petition that describes the fake story as “embarrassing and demoralizing“.

Much of that debt belongs to big banks, of course–J.P. Morgan (JPM) has more than $1 billion by itself. But Tribune (TXA) owes lots (though much smaller amounts) of money to lots of media companies, too–mostly dollars that the company’s TV stations owe various studios.

Here’s who’s on the hook:

• Time Warner’s (TWX) Warner Bros. Television: $23.7 million
• News Corp.’s (NWS) Twentieth Television: $8.1 million
• Disney’s (DIS) Buena Vista Entertainment: $6.2 million
• GE’s (GE) NBCU Domestic TV: $4.9 million
• Sony’s (SNE) Sony Pictures Television: $2.2 million
• Nielsen Media Research: $1.9 million
• Viacom’s (VIA) Paramount Pictures: $1.69 million

Here’s the complete filing (click button on top right to enlarge):
Tribune’s Bankruptcy Filing

And who knows? Maybe John Chambers, Steve Ballmer and Brian Roberts will indeed say something important today and tomorrow at Quadrangle’s Foursquare conference. Chrysler’s Robert Nardelli is speaking too. He might have something newsworthy to say.

But you are unlikely to read about it.

That’s because there’s no press allowed at the private equity shop’s annual conference, which starts this afternoon at New York’s Plaza Hotel.

Or rather, there’s some press at the event. But they’ll be on stage. And they won’t be telling their readers and listeners what they saw and heard.

CNBC’s David Faber, Becky Quick and Maria Bartiromo, for instance, will be moderating panels over the next few days. So will the New York Times’ Andrew Ross Sorkin. And network TV news bigshots Katie Couric, George Stephanopoulos and Brian Williams will answer questions themselves (Portfolio’s Matt Cooper will be moderating that one).

Am I crabby because I asked (nicely) and couldn’t get in myself? Nah. It’s Quadrangle’s event, and they can run it any way they want. But it does look like a pretty good gathering of worthies. Maybe I’ll park myself in the Plaza’s lobby and see if I can bump into some of them.

Want to join me? Here’s the agenda for next two days:

Tuesday 11/11
2:00 PM WELCOME
Joshua L. Steiner (Quadrangle)

ONE ON ONE WITH JOHN CHAMBERS (Cisco)
Moderated by Jim Citrin (Spencer Stuart)

WHO DO YOU TRUST: INFORMATION AND NEWS IN AN  OPEN WORLD
Tom Glocer (Thomson Reuters), Nancy McKinstry (Wolters Kluwer) and Sheryl Sandberg (Facebook)
Moderated by David Faber (CNBC)

ALL ABOUT WIRELESS
Jean-Bernard Lévy (Vivendi), Naguib Sawiris (Orascom Telecom) and Ben Wolff (Clearwire)
Moderated by Steven Rattner

4:15 PM BREAK

GOING IT ALONE IN AN INTERCONNECTED WORLD
Philippe Dauman (Viacom), Charlie Ergen (EchoStar) and Robert Kotick (Activision)
Moderated by Becky Quick (CNBC)

GLOBAL E-COMMERCE: $500 BILLION AND GROWING
Barry Diller (IAC) and Hiroshi Mikitani (Rakuten)
Moderated by Steve Hasker (McKinsey)

6:15 PM COCKTAIL RECEPTION
Grand Ballroom Foyer
The Plaza

Wednesday 11/12
8:30 AM WELCOME
ONE ON ONE WITH STEVE BALLMER (Microsoft)
Moderated by Ken Auletta (The New Yorker)

INNOVATION AND THE NEXT BIG IDEA
Jean-François Decaux (JC Decaux) Robert Stephens (Geek Squad founder?) and Jim Wiatt (William Morris)
Moderated by Andrew Ross Sorkin (New York Times)

A CONVERSATION WITH SAM ZELL (Equity Group, Tribune Co.)
Moderated by Joanne Lipman (Portfolio)

10:00 AM BREAK

COOP-ER-TITION: A CONVERSATION WITH PETER CHERNIN (News Corp.) AND BRIAN ROBERTS (Comcast)
Moderated by Ken Auletta

REBUILDING A BRAND FROM THE TOP DOWN
Dan Hesse (Sprint) and Robert Nardelli (Chrysler)
Moderated by Maria Bartiromo

NOON Concluding Luncheon
CAMPAIGN 2008: IN FRONT OF THE CAMERA AND BEHIND THE SCENES
Katie Couric (CBS), George Stephanopoulos (ABC) and Brian Williams (NBC)
Moderated by Matt Cooper (Portfolio)

[Image Credit: PinkMoose]

Is Google making us stupid?

The answer to that question, recently posed by Nick Carr in The Atlantic, is a resounding yes. At least in the case of Sun Sentinel publisher Tribune.

How else to explain the company’s claim that Google is largely to blame for the six-year-old news story that gutted the United Airlines share price this week?

In a statement issued Wednesday, Tribune (TXA) said that Google’s indexing of the article, “United Airlines Files for Bankruptcy,” on Google News made the story appear new, even though it was originally published on Dec. 10, 2002.

At 1:36:57 a.m. EDT, September 7, (10:36:57 p.m. PDT, September 6), our records show that the Google search agent–known as “Googlebot”–crawled the story on Sun Sentinel’s website. Our records also show that the Google search agent had previously crawled this same story numerous times, including as recently as last week. Shortly after Googlebot crawled the Sun Sentinel site this time, however, a link to the story appeared on Google News, with a date of Sept. 6, 2008, provided by Google. At 1:39:59 a.m. EDT, September 7 (10:39:59 p.m. PDT, September 6), our records show the story on the Sun Sentinel website received its first referral from Google News.

Apparently, sometime Monday morning, the story was made available to subscribers of Bloomberg News.

As we said yesterday, the December 10, 2002, story contains information that would clearly lead a reader to the conclusion that it was related to events in 2002. In addition, the comments posted along with the story are dated 2002. It appears that no one who passed this story along actually bothered to read the story itself.”

Apparently not. Certainly the Income Securities Advisors employee who published the story to the Bloomberg financial news service didn’t. Because if he did, he surely would have noticed the original publication date in the article’s dateline, right?

Wrong. Turns out the article did not have a dateline or an original publication date. There was, however, a date above the article at the top of the Web page on which it appeared: “September 7, 2008.” Add to this the fact that the article had been given eight different URLs and one of them was listed in the most-viewed section of the Sun Sentinel’s Web site and, well … clearly, this was all Google’s fault.

Please.

Publishing a news story at multiple URLs without a proper publication date in the era of search engine optimization, or SEO, seems just a bit irresponsible for a major news organization doesn’t it? Perhaps not as irresponsible as publishing that story to a financial newswire without reading it or, you know, confirming it–but irresponsible nonetheless.

The SEC is looking into the matter.

[Image Credit: blogstorm]