SCO has made (as yet) unproved statements about the ownership of IBM's products as well claiming that a broad segment of the industry owes them money. In my opinion, these are the kinds of thing that SCO should only say after a successful verdict has been reached. The standard for determining deceptive trade practices is not even that statements need to be proven as false -- only that the company had the capacity to make false statements.
On the other hand the standard for dertimining whether a work is a derivative work is rather easy. Copyright infringement is based on whether the defendant had some legitimate interest in the copyright work, and whether the work constitutes a derivative work. When considering whether a work that includes the copywrighted work of others is an infringement or a derivative work, there is a standard used to determine how much effort was put into a work before it is considered an infringement. This standard, as with the standard for determining deceptince trade practices, is low.
So as I see it, SCO has several hurdles to overcome if it wants to prevail. Burden of proof is on them to prove: that IBM has absolutely no intellectual property rights to derivative UNIX works under its contracts with AT&T USL; that IBM has absolutely no intellectual property rights to NUMA, JFS, SMP, and copy-on-write; that if IBM did have intellectual property rights to NUMA, and etc that their rights to publish them was greatly restricted.
Even if they are able to prove all that, they still haven't proven that Linux isn't a derivative work. They must show that no minimal amount of effort was put into Linux to make it and isntead proprietary code is used throughout. They must show that Linux is actually a fraudulent copy of UNIX, that minimal effort was not put in it to make it work differently that proprietary UNIX.
Even if all this has been proven to be true, that Linux is simply a AT&T System V UNIX with open source window dressing, they still must face the FTC to prove that they did not have the capacity to make a false statement against IBM, Linux, and others.
Personally, I think SCO is in an uphill battle, and everything they have done has been to raise the stakes. If we were playing Texas Hold-em, I would say SCO has been dealt a pair of nines, but a pair of tens is showing on the flop.
What I want to know is, does this high-stakes game really in the best interests of Caldera/SCO's stockholders?
The anwer is "yes," but that's not necessarily a good thing, because there is reason to believe that what few public shareholders there are, are being fleeced by insiders and the holding company (Canopy Group) that owns most of SCO. See this for what Computerworld calls "SCO's Shell Game."