Re: Can you own the number 10.5% ?

On 2/1/99, John R. Levine <johnl[_at_]iecc.com> wrote:
>
> A friend of mine recently wrote a book about personal financial
> software. He mentioned in passing that the long term return on stocks
> is 10.5%, a number that he'd read in a newsletter from Vanguard. That
> number is widely cited in the press -- in a few minutes I found it on
> the web in an article in the Detroit News and a feature piece on family
> finance on Money Magazine's web site, with no citation of a source in
> either case.
>
> Shortly after the book came out, his publisher received a letter from
> Ibbotson Associates, who he'd never heard of until that point, saying
> that the 10.5% number was theirs since they were the only people doing
> long-term analysis of market returns, that was a number they'd
> calculated, and he'd misappropriated their proprietary number. I don't
> know if they demanded a specific remedy or not.
>

[snip]
>
> Am I missing something here?

Timing is all. If the claim is misappropriation, not copyright infringement, perhaps Ibbotson believes the datum was passed to the author under some chain of trade secret agreements which were in effect at the time the book was written. Of course, if the fact had become public earlier than his writing and the author can show he got it at that time from non-proprietary sources, then he should prevail.

Diane Cabell
cabell[_at_]mama-tech.com
http://www.mama-tech.com/

Fausett, Gaeta & Lund, LLP
Boston, MA
http://www.fausett.com/ Received on Wed Feb 03 1999 - 13:44:59 GMT