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> I don't know whether the stories of the legal action had anything to do with the move from .ARC to .ZIP, but I could believe it, on the free BBSes. That's my

> I don't know whether the stories of the legal action had anything to do with the move from .ARC to .ZIP, but I could believe it, on the free BBSes. That's my very clear memory of what happened: PC Magazine and other trade rags reported that people were so pissed off at SEA that they switched en masse to .ZIP; it became a network effect, in that very soon everyone was using .ZIP because everyone was using .ZIP. I was a junior IP lawyer back then; it was a real eye-opener that if a company asserted its IP rights in what was perceived as a bullying way, the resulting PR blowback could destroy the company itself as people voted with their dollars. That was decidedly not what new IP lawyers were taught; much of the IP world regarded (and still regards) IP rights as virtually sacrosanct, to be prioritized over practically all other values.

jacquesm 6y ago
Elsevier will likely find this out the hard way one of these days.
dusted 6y ago
SEA told that the PKware source code still had their spelling mistakes in the comments, which was part of why they were a bit indignant by the whole thing.. But this is a story about one mom-pop biz vs another, but that didn't really come to light until years after.
- dctoedt 6y ago
  > SEA told that the PKware source code still had their spelling mistakes in the comments That's like the Apple v. Franklin Computer case from the early 1980s: Franklin made a computer with an OS that it said was "compatible" with the Apple II; Franklin claimed to have independently developed its own OS, but it turned out that the Franklin code included not only what must have been thousands of identical lines as the Apple code, but also the name of one of the Apple programmers, James Huston, as well as the name "Applesoft." [0] (If memory serves, I read somewhere that the names were embedded as values of no-op string variables so that they wouldn't be stripped out during compilation, as comments would be.) [0] Apple Computer, Inc. v. Franklin Computer Corp., 714 F. 2d 1240, 1245 (3d Cir. 1983), https://scholar.google.com/scholar_case?case=10063204125696546680#p1245 https://scholar.google.com/scholar_case?case=100632041256965...

jacquesm 6y ago

Elsevier will likely find this out the hard way one of these days.

dusted 6y ago

SEA told that the PKware source code still had their spelling mistakes in the comments, which was part of why they were a bit indignant by the whole thing.. But this is a story about one mom-pop biz vs another, but that didn't really come to light until years after.

dctoedt 6y ago
> SEA told that the PKware source code still had their spelling mistakes in the comments That's like the Apple v. Franklin Computer case from the early 1980s: Franklin made a computer with an OS that it said was "compatible" with the Apple II; Franklin claimed to have independently developed its own OS, but it turned out that the Franklin code included not only what must have been thousands of identical lines as the Apple code, but also the name of one of the Apple programmers, James Huston, as well as the name "Applesoft." [0] (If memory serves, I read somewhere that the names were embedded as values of no-op string variables so that they wouldn't be stripped out during compilation, as comments would be.) [0] Apple Computer, Inc. v. Franklin Computer Corp., 714 F. 2d 1240, 1245 (3d Cir. 1983), https://scholar.google.com/scholar_case?case=10063204125696546680#p1245 https://scholar.google.com/scholar_case?case=100632041256965...