A district court judge in the US has tossed out almost 200 of The SCO Group Inc.'s claims of intellectual property violation against IBM. The judge said that SCO had failed to identify the alleged infringements in sufficient detail.

In a 39-page ruling last week, Judge Brooke Wells of the U.S. District Court in Utah also hauled up SCO for its "wilful failure" to identify exactly which parts of the software distributed by IBM allegedly infringe on SCO's intellectual property.

IBM, through a motion, had asked for 201 of SCO's 294 claims of intellectual property violation to be dropped before trial. After some clarifications, IBM continued to press for 198 claims to be dropped. The judge has now dropped all but about a dozen of those claims. The judge noted that her action was not based on their merits but because of SCO's failure to specify for IBM the source code in question.

SCO filed its lawsuit in 2003, arguing that IBM misappropriated portions of SCO's copyrighted Unix System V software code and contributed them to the Linux operating system. IBM has denied any wrongdoing and questioned the validity of SCO's copyrights.

SCO had argued that it was sufficient for it to have identified the "methods and concepts" that it says were misappropriated by IBM. The judge disagreed, saying SCO should have identified the specific source code as well.