Xref: utzoo misc.legal:10881 comp.misc:6956 comp.sys.ibm.pc:34868
Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!cs.utexas.edu!uunet!portal!cup.portal.com!Matthew_Eric_Seitz
From: Matthew_Eric_Seitz@cup.portal.com
Newsgroups: misc.legal,comp.misc,comp.sys.ibm.pc
Subject: Legal status of ARC
Message-ID: <22255@cup.portal.com>
Date: 18 Sep 89 02:43:11 GMT
Distribution: usa
Organization: The Portal System (TM)
Lines: 15


	I seem to remember reading an article a couple of months back by
John Dvorak stating that Software Enhancements Associates (SEA) had won its
lawsuit against Phil Katz's PKWARE Corp. for violating its copyright on
ARC by publishing PKARC.  As I understood it, the judge ruled that it was
illegal for a company to produce a program which produced files using the ARC
compression algorithm or that had a .ARC extension.  Nothing was mentioned
about the legality of programs that uncompress SEA ARC files.

	Could anyone provide me with further details of the case and the
final ruling?  What are the implications for other "clone" programs that
create data files compatible with other programs?

					Matthew Seitz
					Matthew_Eric_Seitz@cup.portal.com