Origins
Inslaw, once called the Institute for Law and Social Research, was a non-profit business created in 1974 by William Anthony Hamilton, "a former analyst with the National Security Agency and onetime contract employee of the CIA." Inslaw's original software product, Promis, was a database designed to handle papers and documents generated by law enforcement agencies and courts. Promis was a people-tracking program which had the power to integrate innumerable databases regardless of their languages, or regardless of their operating platforms. "Every use of Promis in the court system is tracking people," explained Hamilton. "You can rotate the file by case, defendant, arresting officer, judge, defense lawyer, and it's tracking all the names of all the people in all the cases."
Promis was funded almost entirely by government funds; therefore versions created prior to January 1978 were in the public domain. On January 1, 1978, amendments to the Copyright Act of 1976 took effect, automatically conferring upon Inslaw as the author of Promis five exclusive software copyright rights, none of which could be waived except by explicit, written waiver. The federal government negotiated licenses to use but not to modify or to distribute outside the federal government some but not all versions of Promis created after the January 1978 effective-date of the copyright amendments. In 1981, after Congress liquidated the Justice Department's Law Enforcement Assistance Administration (LEAA) (which had been the primary source of funds for Inslaw's development of Promis), the company became known as Inslaw, Inc., a for-profit corporation created to further develop and market Promis and other Promis-derivative software product(s).
The newly created corporation made significant improvements to the original software. The resulting product came to be known alternately as Promis '82 or Enhanced Promis, a 32-bit architecture VAX 11/780 version.
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