At 04:14 PM 1/18/98 -0700, toback2 wrote:
>I wrote PDQ. It's a fairly safe bet that it would happen again.
>Essentially every claim made in Cognos's lawsuit was false. They even
>claimed that Quiz users don't own their own Quiz code; if it's written in
>Quiz, they said, it belongs to Cognos. But it makes no difference: he who
>has the most money for lawyers wins.
This is a very timely subject for me!
In 1986, as the designer and developer of the Carolian Sysview product, I
left to form my own company and develop a performance monitoring tool.  In
July 1986, Carolian sued me.  In Feb 1987, the courts granted Carolian an
interlogatory injunction keeping me from continuing with my product until
the matter reached trial.  I went to work as a contractor for Strategic
Systems Inc to help market and support their Probe performance monitoring
product.  In 1988, an injunction was granted Carolian to stop me from
having anything to do with the Probe/3000 product also.  In 1992, we went
to trial on the issues of the action.  In 1993, the courts ruled in my
favor.  Last week (January 12, 1998) we began a three week trial on the
issues of quantum of damages.  I suppose in a few months when the damages
are set, they will appeal the decision and drag it out for another year or
more.  A number of the active participants of this list are appearing, or
have already appeared on my behalf.  In fact, I must rush off to pick one
of them up at the airport tonite.
While the issue is not directly applicable to the PDQ / Cognos one, it
certainly shows the way this type of litigation proceeds.  Had I not been
in a position to lose everything that I had accumulated over a 20 year
career, I would have gladly dropped the action out of sheer frustration.
The legal fees in this matter are in excess of $1,000,000
Carolian apparently thought it was worth it to keep me out of the marketplace.
Of course, since then Delrina has bought Carolian, Symantec has bought
Delrina and Lund has acquired the Carolian assets (no hard feelings towards
Lund by the way, it is simply good business on their part).

>
>The merits of the case are, by and large, irrelevant. Cognos used their
>lawyers to deprive users of a legitimate, legal alternative; it was very
>clear they could keep the case going for as long as they wished and eat
>up anything that Tymlabs could hope to gain by selling the product. So
>Tymlabs settled the case and stopped marketing the product. With no
>marketing, and with Cognos spreading fear, uncertainty and doubt, the
>product died.
It is called "competition by litigation".  I guess if you can't compete on
a product features and benefit basis and you have "deep pockets", then
litigation is another approach.



Brian Duncombe  [log in to unmask]  http://www.triolet.com
"Whether you think you can or think you can't, you are right."
          Henry Ford