Well I am glad to see that Martin seems to be well on the good side of ethical in all this... because it makes the resulting issues simpel and easy. * PCF is a file format. While it is conceivable that the algorithm Maz uses to produce the format is patented the basic file format cannot be so patented. Thus, reverse engineering the PCF format without lookign at source code will almost always result in a perfectly legal utility. * The concept of encoding a file with another file is much, much older than PCF. So the basic concept behind PCF would never stand up to a patent challenge. Heck, a simple, cross platform version of this utility could be hacked together using the "diff" or "patch" utilities and a batch file if you wanted to be nice. So it looks like Martin is making a new format, with all new code, not based on the Maz code that he apparently never saw. I really can't imagine that there is a problem here.