the lawsuit that created ZIP

programmingops culture

The 1988 lawsuit that was meant to protect the ARC format, and instead produced ZIP.

The 1988 lawsuit meant to protect the ARC format instead ended it, because its target designed ZIP and published the specification for anyone to implement.

Before ZIP there was ARC, and a young programmer named Phil Katz wrote a faster implementation of it called PKARC. The company behind ARC sued him in 1988 for copying its format and code, and won enough that Katz stopped distributing it. His response was to design a new format from scratch and publish the specification so that anybody could implement it without asking permission. He called it ZIP, reportedly because it was meant to be quicker than ARC. The lawsuit intended to protect a format ended it, and created the one that replaced it so completely that most people have never heard of the thing it replaced. That is the whole lesson and it recurs constantly: a format's value comes from ubiquity, ubiquity comes from anybody being able to implement it, and litigating against implementers is a way of guaranteeing that a competing format becomes ubiquitous instead. The industry keeps relearning it, usually while a lawyer is explaining why this case is different. ZIP is now in operating systems, browsers, office documents, application packages and firmware, and the ARC company is a footnote in a story about the format that beat it. The rest is less cheerful and should not be omitted from a piece of lore that celebrates an outcome. Katz did not benefit from what he built in any way that lasted. He struggled with alcoholism through the 1990s, withdrew from the company that carried his initials, and was found dead in a hotel room in 2000 at the age of thirty-seven. The format he wrote is on essentially every computing device manufactured since. Both of those sentences are true and the second one does not follow from the first.

Also known as: phil katz, pkzip, pkarc, sea arc lawsuit

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