Ruling that Ashton-Tate Corp’s original copyright for dBase III Plus was invalid, a Federal judge in Los Angeles dismissed the Torrance, California company’s copyright infringement suit against Fox Software Inc with prejudice – which means that the issue is closed as far as the Los Angeles Federal Court is concerned. Judge Terrence Hatter ruled that dBase III Plus is a derivative work from JPL/DIS, a mainframe data language originally developed at the Jet Propulsion Laboratories in Pasadena, California, and the decision is also expected to affect dBase IV, which is primarily derived from dBase III Plus. The decision implies that the judge believes Ashton-Tate wilfully misled the Copyright Office, and was not prepared to allow the company to make a new filing covering only the things that are its own work. It is yet another major blow to Ashton-Tate, which has not yet recovered from the failure to ship dBase IV on time. It seemed stunned by the de cision, with chief executive Willi am Lyons finding himself tongue- tied: We haven’t been able to art iculate why he’s in error: we will do that next week, he said. Borl and International Inc is now expec ted to leap in with products that make its Paradox dBase-compatible.
