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SCO has replied to Novell's accusations, on PR News Wire.
SCO's brief reply to Novell implicitly acknowledges that SCO does not own the Unix copyright.
SCO claims that their action against IBM is a contract action, not a copyright law action. This might allow SCO to enforce some rights against companies that have already purchased licenses from SCO, but potentially lets the GNU/Linux crowd off the hook. Presumably, Novell could license IBM and the Linux developers if any concrete evidence of infringement came up and SCO continued to obstinately push the issue. Not that SCO had shown any evidence to prove its accusations, anyway.
Just what is the intellectual property that SCO could enforce with its contracts? Since it's not patents or copyrights, it must be trade secrets, and a trade-secret case is very difficult to win - in fact, no plaintiff has ever won a case like this one. SCO would have to show that the material actually was secret, which is extremely unlikely in the case of Unix, and the actual owner of the trade secrets would be there in court contradicting SCO.
Bio: Bruce Perens is a director of Software in the Public Interest, Inc., an Open Source development organization. He operates an independent consultancy and is a senior research scientist for Open Source at George Washington University's Cyber Security Policy Research Institute.