Xref: utzoo comp.sys.ibm.pc:16492 comp.sources.d:2320 Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!husc6!bloom-beacon!think!ames!nrl-cmf!cmcl2!brl-adm!brl-smoke!w8sdz From: w8sdz@brl-smoke.ARPA (Keith B. Petersen ) Newsgroups: comp.sys.ibm.pc,comp.sources.d Subject: Re: Phil Katz (PKARC author) sued by SEA (ARC author) Summary: SEA's ARC was based on other copyrighted programs Keywords: pkarc,arc,sea,suit Message-ID: <8111@brl-smoke.ARPA> Date: 17 Jun 88 23:04:21 GMT References: <8084@brl-smoke.ARPA> <16800302@clio> Reply-To: w8sdz@brl.arpa (Keith Petersen) Organization: Ballistic Research Lab (BRL), APG, MD. Lines: 40 Reading SEA's own documentation for any version of ARC you will find that the program was based on the Unix "compress", Richard Greenlaw's "squeeze/unsqueeze" and the *copyrighted* LZW crunch. The copyright for LZW is owned by Unisys. Perhaps it's time for them to assert their rights and sue SEA. It seems to me that SEA's copyright is invalid because one cannot take another copyrighted work, modify it and then copyright it. It seems that SEA has opened a "can of worms". After announcing the availability of an update of SEA's ARC program, I received the following message which raises serious doubts as to the validity of SEA's copyright. Since this is a private message I have omitted the sender's address. --forwarded message-- To: Keith Petersen Re: Message for the authors of ARC I don't know how to get in touch with the authors of ARC (I didn't see any addresses in INFO-IBMPC), but since you seem to be posting information about new versions, etc., I thought that you might be able to forward the following mail to them. 1) The correct spelling of the name is Ziv. So you should call it Lempel-Ziv (or Ziv-Lempel because that was the order of the author's names in the original paper) encoding. 2) The original Ziv-Lempel method is patented (#4,464,650 -- Willard Eastman, Abraham Lempel, Jacob Ziv, Martin Cohen) assigned to Sperry Univac (now Unisys). Since the Welch modifications are to this method, I would think that some sort of license agreement from Unisys would be necessary (this is really only a practical problem for commercial customers). Does such an agreement exist? --end forwarded message-- -- Keith Petersen Arpa: W8SDZ@SIMTEL20.ARPA Uucp: {bellcore,decwrl,harvard,lll-crg,ucbvax,uw-beaver}!simtel20.arpa!w8sdz GEnie: W8SDZ