He didn’t even need to outdo Phil, just come close, and then most people would have never had a reason to switch.

I, on the other hand, should have made my archiver ARC compatible. I may have ended up paying Thom royalties in that case, but perhaps I would have been the one to make the millions then. Alas.

But consider that SEA was big enough to file a serious lawsuit against Phil. That alone made them appear larger than typical shareware authors were at the time.

But the crucial factor for me is simply that PKARC compressed better and ran much faster than ARC. People naturally loved PKARC for just those reasons. It was obvious then to anybody that Thom was losing income simply because ARC wasn’t competitive. And what do big mean companies do who can’t compete? Why of course they sue to squash the little guy.

In other words, Phil didn’t have to do *anything* to wage an effective PR campaign, other than make a program that was clearly better and then get slapped with a lawsuit for things like his program’s name, the command-line interface and supposedly stealing code. All three of those claims seemed laughable, at least to people who weren’t steeped in the law, and that made Thom appear to be a bully. Compounding the laughable claims was the very slowness of ARC that made Thom come across as a lumbering Goliath, while the zippy PKARC made Phil look like a fleet and nimble David.

Moreover, there was the perceived injustice of it all, for it was clear that Thom was incapable of speeding of ARC. Thus, it looked for all the world as if Thom resorted to suing simply because he couldn’t write blazing fast code like Phil could.

Now this would have been much different if this had been just a lawsuit between consultants. But it wasn’t. ARC and PKARC were used by the public and Phil was inherently seen as the upstart who through hard work had created a better product that people wanted. Everyone knew Phil had started out creating PKARC by himself (not as part of a company). Doesn’t that make him small by definition, even if his success allowed him to grow after that?

In short, while the documentary makes it appear that Phil somehow was able to wage a better PR campaign than Thom, that PR campaign didn’t require deception or better “framing” of the issue to succeed. It needed only a *single* aspect — that Phil had created a better product on his own, along with the perception that the established and dominate SEA was trying to squash him for it.

So yes, Thom’s mistake was looking at this issue as an engineer and not as a PR issue. But he didn’t lose the battle because Phil waged a better PR campaign. He lost the PR battle because it looked like he was incapable of making ARC better, and chose to file a lawsuit instead.

The *only* part of Thom’s lawsuit that most people felt a measure of sympathy for was the allegation that Phil had stolen his code. Nobody likes somebody stealing somebody else’s work. But in this case it was just too hard to believe. Phil’s program was just so much better. The instinctive thought was why would Phil even *want* to steal Thom’s code?

And thus the lawsuit ultimately came across as implausible and people’s sympathies largely went with Phil. Right or wrong as that may be.

But I don’t think Thom to this day understands that. In effect, he’s still losing the PR battle. Amazing.

I remember when it was happening, and seemingly en masse, the BBS operators, and early internet hosts switching over to zip from arc. I cheered for Phil then, and nothing I have read makes me think in hindsight that it was not the right thing to do.

But the law doesn’t make things morally right. It just makes them legal.

The law allows authors to protect their intellectual property, and for good reason. There are thieves who will steal what belongs to you and that took you great effort to create. A person who copies DVD’s and sells them didn’t do all the work to make the movie, they just steal it. And that’s wrong.

But for me, except for the issue of the ARC file format itself, Thom used legal technicalities in an attempt to stop legitimate competition. Phil certainly made mistakes, but in my view, he didn’t really steal anything (especially given that I view the file format itself more as public property).

And in that case, it wasn’t morally right for Thom to defend his intellectual property to the extent he did, regardless of what the law may or may not have actually allowed him to do.

Does that make sense?