Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!husc6!uwvax!oddjob!ncar!noao!arizona!gudeman
From: gudeman@arizona.edu (David Gudeman)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.ibm.pc
Subject: Re: Phil Katz (PKARC author) sued by SE
Message-ID: <5912@megaron.arizona.edu>
Date: 18 Jun 88 17:28:50 GMT
Organization: U of Arizona CS Dept, Tucson
Lines: 18

In article  <16800302@clio> berger@clio.las.uiuc.edu writes:
>
>I agree with Bill Davidsen.  How can I judge without more details?  It's
>clear that Sea's ARC was the model for pkarc.

I wouldn't want to over react either -- if Phil Katz actually used
original source code from arc, there is a clear copyright violation.
But the article posted to the net implied that the law suit is over
the fact that pkarc does the same thing as arc, and over the
similarity in names.  And the _only_ thing original about arc is
(possibly) the format of the archives.  The idea of archives, the user
interface and the naming convention (prefix of "archive") have been
around (at least) since early UNIX in the form of ar.

It would be disastrous for the computer community if courts started
ruling that data formats are copyrightable.  For example, you might
even be accused of copyright violation you wrote a program to read
files in WordStar format and change them to ascii.