THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Thursday, January 26, 1995 TAG: 9501260346
SECTION: BUSINESS PAGE: D6 EDITION: FINAL
SOURCE: NEWPORT NEWS DAILY PRESS
DATELINE: RICHMOND LENGTH: Medium: 57 lines
Newport News Shipbuilding, which relies heavily on sophisticated computer systems in virtually every phase of its business, is battling Northern Virginia high-tech companies over computer law.
And that conflict brought to light for the first time Tuesday an incident several years ago that shipyard executives now say came close to shutting down the yard temporarily.
With a bill it is pushing in this year's session of the General Assembly, the shipyard means to make sure it never again comes that close to a halt at the hands of a computer vendor.
A dispute with Computer Associates International Inc., a giant software company, almost shut down the yard, executives said.
Computer Associates, the nation's second-largest software company, had secretly embedded a ``time bomb'' in software that it had licensed to the yard for a certain period of time. Once the contract expired, the software would be rendered useless, the shipyard said.
At the time, the yard and Computer Associates were negotiating renewal of the contract.
Everything at the yard done with computers - from inventory control to accounting - could have been disrupted if the Computer Associates software had been disabled, said Paul D. Seay Jr., the yard's supervisor of IBM system support. ``They've got a gun to our heads,'' William Welch, the shipyard's chief lobbyist, said of the companies that control the software used at the yard.
Instead of just pulling the plug on the shipyard, the yard should be allowed to keep using the software while any dispute, such as that over a contract, is worked out in court, Welch said.
A Computer Associates spokesman at company headquarters in Islandia, N.Y., confirmed the dispute. He acknowledged that his firm's software sometimes includes coding to keep it from being used after the term of a contract expires. The bill submitted to the General Assembly on the shipyard's behalf by Del. Alan Diamonstein, D-Newport News, would make the secret implanting of such coding a criminal offense.
Diamonstein, who argued the merits of the bill before the Committee on Courts of Justice, said afterward that the shipyard had spent millions of dollars on a court case with Computer Associates ``trying to prove a point'' and now needed this protection. The yard and Computer Associates reached an out-of-court settlement.
Fighting the bill is the Northern Virginia Technology Council, a trade group. Their spokesman agreed that there should be disclosure to a customer whenever disabling coding is implanted in computer software. But he told the House of Delegate's Committee on Courts of Justice that a criminal penalty was too stiff and that disputes like this usually are resolved in civil court. by CNB