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 UUCP: {decvax,mit-eddie}!genrad!teddy!jpn smail: jpn@genrad.com -- john nelson UUCP: {decvax,mit-eddie}!genrad!teddy!jpn smail: jpn@genrad.com