Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!husc6!uwvax!vanvleck!uwmcsd1!bbn!gatech!psuvax1!psuhcx!wcf
From: wcf@psuhcx.psu.edu (Bill Fenner)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.ibm.pc
Subject: Re: Phil Katz (PKARC author) sued by SEA (ARC author)
Message-ID: <156@psuhcx.psu.edu>
Date: 20 Jun 88 15:55:21 GMT
References: <5912@megaron.arizona.edu> <4499@killer.UUCP> <308@sdrc.UUCP>
Reply-To: wcf@psuhcx (Bill Fenner)
Organization: Penn State University
Lines: 29

In article <308@sdrc.UUCP> scjones@sdrc.UUCP (Larry Jones) writes:
|The source code certainly contains copyright notices,
|	(...)
|myself any longer.  Thom Henderson had a really good idea to combine a number
|of existing data compression algorithms with an archiver to produce ARC, but
|that's all he did -- there was very little original code in ARC.  In fact,
                                ^^^^ ^^^^^^ ^^^^^^^^ ^^^^ ^^ ^^^
|the source code used to contain comments to the effect that he hadn't the
|foggiest idea how the LZW compression worked, he just copied the code from
                                                  ^^^^ ^^^^^^ ^^^ ^^^^ ^^^^
|somewhere else.  It's incredibly hypocritical to criticize, let alone sue,
 ^^^^^^^^^ ^^^^
|Phil Katz for doing the same thing (and I presume Phil copied from the same
|places as Thom did, as opposed to copying from Thom's copyrighted code).

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.  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.

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.

-- 
    Bitnet: wcf@psuhcx.bitnet     Bill Fenner     | "How can we dance
   Internet: wcf@hcx.psu.edu                      |  When the beds are burning"
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