Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!husc6!bloom-beacon!mit-eddie!genrad!panda!teddy!jpn
From: jpn@teddy.UUCP (John P. Nelson)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.ibm.pc
Subject: Re: Phil Katz (PKARC author) sued by SEA (ARC author)
Message-ID: <4864@teddy.UUCP>
Date: 21 Jun 88 14:26:14 GMT
References: <5912@megaron.arizona.edu> <4499@killer.UUCP> <308@sdrc.UUCP> <156@psuhcx.psu.edu>
Reply-To: jpn@teddy.UUCP (John P. Nelson)
Organization: GenRad, Inc., Concord, Mass.
Lines: 55

>If Thom simply copied lots of code, how can he copyright it?  He can copyright
>the way he put it together, but he can not copyright the code that others
>wrote.

If the code was "public domain", there is absolutely no restriction on
what you can do with it, including copyrighting it.  Assuming that Thom
used COPYRIGHTED code, then he could not use the code AT ALL unless he was
specifically given permission to do so:  And if he was given permission
to do so, he may be allowed to copyright his new changes: it depends on
what the original copyright holder specifies.

>Even if the other code wasn't copyrighted (which I'm almost positive
>it was), it's truly immoral to claim another's work as your own.

The UNIX "compress" is truly public domain.  Oh, Lempel-Ziv-Walsh
have a PATENT for a hardware implementation of the algorithm, but
they have blessed a public-domain software implementation.

I don't know what Huffman encoding source code Thom "borrowed", but
I am absolutely sure that there are true public-domain versions of this
code also (I have one of them!)  The algorithm has been published,
and several people reimplemented it from scratch.

As for the rest of the code, I will bet that Thom did not COPY any code
verbatim:  he simply used well-known techniques.  The ARC file format is
not exactly the same as any other archive that I know of.  Actually,
the compression was added AFTER the base ARC program had been written.
I suspect that ARC 1.0 was 100% original code.

Is this immoral?  I don't know.  I would rather HAVE arc, than not have
it. I believe that the public welfare has been served, especially since
ARC is distributed FREE, with a charge only for SUPPORT.

>And if Thom copied from several different peoples' copyrighted code, how
>could he dare to sue PK for (allegedly) copying from Thom's copyrighted code.
>Thom's copyright may be rather shaky.

No, I suspect Thom's copyright on the ARC code is airtight.  However, the
suit doesn't seem to allege that PK used copyrighted CODE (PKARC is largely
in assembly language, although it is unclear if this assembly code is a
direct translation of Thom's copyrighted C code - certainly this would
be difficult to prove).  No, the suit appears to be more stupid than that:
it seems to be because PK used the copyrighted name "ARC" as part of his
program's name, and because certain displays (pkarc -v) are identical to
ARC's.
-- 
     john nelson

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-- 
     john nelson

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