Vault Corporation
Vault Corporation was founded in 1981 by W. Krag Brotby, an unsung technology pioneer.[1] Already a successful real-estate entrepreneur, Brotby authored a book and software program called Tax and Cash. Frustrated by "pirating" of the software (people making copies for free without paying for it) Brotby came up with an ingenius mechanism to defeat illegal copying. He called it the Prolok Disk (US patent 4,785,361).[2] The technology is foundational to many of today's most sophisticated anti-piracy techniques and his original patent is referenced on more than 140 later patents. Prolok was used by many early 80's software companies [3] including Ashton-Tate, developers of the first massively successful PC database software. Vault also invested millions of dollars on the legal front on behalf of the software industry as a whole, authoring and testing the first "Shrink Wrap" software law which was ultimately defeated in the 5th circuit federal appeals court but laid important groundwork for what are today's successful shrink wrap contracts.