Vault Corporation

Vault Corporation was founded in 1981 by W. Krag Brotby, an unsung technology pioneer.[1] Already a successful real-estate entrepreneur, Brotby authored a book and software program called Tax and Cash. Frustrated by "pirating" of the software (people making copies for free without paying for it) Brotby came up with a mechanism to attempt to defeat illegal copying. He called it the Prolok Disk (US patent 4,785,361).[2] The technology was influential in many later copy-protection techniques and his original patent is referenced on more than 140 later patents. Prolok was used by many early 80's software companies [3] including Ashton-Tate, developers of the first massively successful PC database software. Vault also invested millions of dollars on the legal front on behalf of the software industry as a whole, authoring and testing the first of many controversial "Shrink Wrap" software law. Vault's contract was ultimately defeated in the 5th Circuit Federal Appeals Court.

See also

References

This article is issued from Wikipedia - version of the 3/9/2016. The text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution/Share Alike but additional terms may apply for the media files.