Re: Politics and Authorship in Scientific Journals

Responding to Bruce Hayden's question, I recall that Judge Hatter in the Ashton-Tate case against Fox initially ruled that the registration for dBase II was invalid for failure to disclose that it was based on a preexisting work, namely the Vulcan program that Richard Ross had written while employed at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory. I think Bob Kohn, later GC of Borland and then an executive at PGP (Pretty Good Privacy), and the co-author (with his father) of a book that has been mentioned favorably on this list (The Art of Music Licensing), had prepared the registration and submitted an affidavit concerning his intent. If my recollection is correct, Judge Hatter changed his ruling after Ralph Oman, then the Register of Copyrights, submitted an affidavit about CO registration practices. Perhaps this is the same case you worked on -- the parallels are there -- but it's the only one I can think of in the last decade where the defense actually succeeded, if only for a short while.

The epilogue to the story is that Borland later bought Ashton-Tate, obtaining FTC approval for the merger (problematic because Borland was selling a competing database product, Paradox) on the condition that it abandon any claim to copyright protection for the dBase command set, which was the issue in the case against Fox. Microsoft then bought Fox and Borland eventually lost a ton of money trying to sell dBase and digest Ashton-Tate.

Kerry L. Konrad
<k_konrad[_at_]stblaw.com> Received on Thu Jun 17 1999 - 14:12:02 GMT