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The court met to discuss whether SCO had met a court order to provide IBM with the documentation it requested to build its defence. IBM's lawyer told the court 'SCO abandons any claim that IBM misappropriated its trade secrets, concedes that SCO has no evidence that IBM improperly disclosed UNIX System V code, and acknowledges that SCO's contract case is grounded solely on the proposition that IBM improperly disclosed portions of IBM's own AIX or Dynix products, which SCO claims to be derivatives of UNIX System V.'

And with regard to this, IBM said that far from SCO CEO Darl McBride's public comments that SCO's claim were 'broad and deep' and that IBM had stuffed 'truckloads' of SCO-owned code into Linux, the company had identified bits of just 17 AIX or Dynix files.

Indeed, as far as supplying specific details of the allegedly infringing code to IBM as the court had ordered, IBM said SCO admitted that it 'had indeed failed to produce numerous responsive documents'.

In its initial response to the court order SCO had said one of the reasons why it had failed to produce all of the evidence IBM requested was that it needed code from IBM in order to examine it to detail any areas of infringement. In court IBM argued how then it was possible that SCO verified that Sun and HP had not infringed without requiring them to submit code.

SCO is also seeking, however, to amend its complaint against IBM to include copyright infringement claims that could amount to $5bn or more in damages. The

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new claims stem from IBM's continued AIX business following SCO terminating its licence to use its Unix code in the products back in July last year.

Gregory Blepp, Vice President SCOsource, told us: 'The trade secret claim was an initial option, however, based on evidence and the ways in which the case has developed it has become a clear copyright violation. The US Supreme Court states that whenever a licence is used, for which the party is no longer under contract, it is considered a copyright violation.'

That option has formed the basis of SCO's case up to now as its First Cause of Complaint in its suit.

SCO originally went to court for damages of around $1bn on the misappropriation of trade secrets issue, this subsequently rose to $3bn. So now that the trade secrets allegations have been dropped, quite what a new figure of $5bn encompasses - which only covers the half a year or so since SCO revoked that licence - is unclear.

Blepp explained: 'This $5bn number is calculated by adding the original $3bn claim to the new $2bn copyright claim - the $2bn is a calculation of the damage and the almost additional year this will have gone on for.

'The trade secrets allegations are negligible in the original suggested $3bn damages... there is little point in getting too in-depth with the mathematics at this stage, as all figures are approximations until a judge rules on the wealth of the claim.'

Even so, Novell still maintains that, of the residual Unix rights it claims to have, it can over-rule SCO and reinstate IBM's licence.

Staff attorney at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, Jason Schultz, told us: 'I think SCO is attempting to step up the pressure on IBM with these new claims, but in the end, they offer nothing new to the case. The case has and always will come down to whether SCO has rights in any of the code at issue that it hasn't already given away via GPL. Those rights may be enforceable via contract or copyright but in the end, SCO will have to prove both that they own them and that IBM and others have wrongfully taken advantage of them.'