Arcwars -- Data Compression From Philosophy To Commercial Exploitation (NOT KNOWN IF PUBLISHED BECAUSE AUTHOR HAS LEFT AT&T)

About a century and a half ago Samuel Morse worried about optimizing the construction of his telegraph code. How many dots and dashes should he assign to each letter? Today we have beautiful mathematical theories, but still no one knows the answer to the central question -- how many bits per letter does it take to represent the English language? The discovery by Lempel and Ziv of a powerful algorithm for data compression led to a fascinating chain of events which seems a microcosm of the scientific, legal, and ethical issues in software today. As two small companies squabbled over the legal rights in software, the user community of the world suffered the indignity of having its most popular program for file transfer compression ruled illegal. What is going on here?