{original post had no questions}

"...infact I think it first aired about 6 weeks before the B5 pilot."

Yeah, they pushed through their post production specifically to
beat us into the marketplace.

"I can certainly understand you being "devastated" to find out about
DS9 and am surprised, given the penchant for court action in the USA,
that you have never started legal action for plagiarism."

It was discussed with WB for some time, but they felt that it
would be like getting into a protracted land war in Asia, and the
litigation might prevent B5 from getting a fair shot by being embroiled
in a conflict right out of the gate.

"As far as stealing your car is concerned, if your car was stolen you
would not have use of it. You still retained use of the B5 idea and the
fact that it is similar <g> to DS9 did not prevent it being produced."

Actually, it almost did. WB came within an inch of canceling
the whole thing because they weren't sure the market could sustain two
space station series. It also hurt us in that fans thought that *we*
were the copycats, since we aired second. And Paramount played a lot
of games with the stations to try and keep us off the air so they'd
have the field to themselves. It took us almost two years to really
recover from the damage, it's still an annoyance that we seem to be
providing DS9 with R&D free of charge, and we still have a lot of fans
who think we copied them since our pilot aired second.

jms