Avoiding LispWorks Personal annoyances
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From: Tamas K Papp on 28 Sep 2009 13:49 On Mon, 28 Sep 2009 17:09:03 +0000, Kaz Kylheku wrote: > 4. The plaintiff offered the the copyrighted work to the world for free > downloadd. In so doing, the plaintiff weakened their grasp on the > copyright, by giving up some of their rights. They have given up the IANAL, but I don't think it works that way. You can, for example, post some code under the GPL and still retain copyright, it is not "weakened". > This is analogous to a car manufacturer wanting to stop owners (or It appears that none of the participants in this discussion are lawyers or sufficiently trained in law to answer these things, so we resort to analogies and speculation (I did, too; don't think I am pointing fingers, just stating a fact). However, it seems that analogies are not that informative, one can always make a different counter-analogy and continue ad infinitum. I myself always regret when I make these analogies, ex post I always feel like a third grader discussing quantum physics. Tamas
From: Raffael Cavallaro on 28 Sep 2009 16:00 On 2009-09-28 13:09:03 -0400, Kaz Kylheku <kkylheku(a)gmail.com> said: > 1. The user in question has not entered into any formal contract with the > copyright holder. This is where you go wrong. It's only possible to install the software via the downloaded installer. The installer won't run until you click the "Agree" button, agreeing to the license (which I've been quoting from). US Federal courts have upheld the validity of these sorts of click through EULAs. -- Raffael Cavallaro
From: Dave Searles on 28 Sep 2009 17:30 Raffael Cavallaro wrote: > On 2009-09-27 12:48:52 -0400, Dave Searles <searles(a)hoombah.nurt.bt.uk> > said: > >> In fact there's an explicit denial of that: the right of first sale. > > He's talking about the free trial version. Since there hasn't been any > sale, it's difficult to invoke the right of first sale. I'm pretty sure it doesn't matter if it's an actual sale, so long as it wasn't a rental. If you got a copy that the copyright holder said you can keep, you can keep it, and the copyright holder isn't allowed to revoke it or change it from a sale to a rental (or from a gift to a rental) after the fact.
From: A.L. on 28 Sep 2009 17:35 On Fri, 25 Sep 2009 04:48:02 -0700 (PDT), gnubeard <gnubeard(a)gmail.com> wrote: >For those annoyed with the 5-hour timeout in LispWorks Personal >Edition: > This is simply stealing somebody's property. A.L.
From: Dave Searles on 28 Sep 2009 17:47
Raffael Cavallaro wrote: > On 2009-09-27 20:13:22 -0400, gnubeard <gnubeard(a)gmail.com> said: >> The fact that LW supplies a legitimate >> perpetual-use license for LW Personal to me, free of charge, is the >> main point. > > Yes, but that license has conditions and those conditions must be obeyed > or the license is void. Whether or not resetting one's system clock > violates those conditions would be a question for the courts to decide, > but it's distinctly possible they'd see it as deliberate circumvention > of the terms of the license. This seems to be a common theory, but it looks legally deficient. You need a copyright holder's permission to make and distribute copies. In the case of software, that means whoever hosts it on a server or stamps out the discs in a duplication factory and ships them out in a fleet of trucks needs the copyright holder's permission. Yes, it's clearly artificial scarcity but it's the law, at least for now. On the other hand, no further permission is needed to USE those discs, according to the law, any more than to read or reread a book or play a music CD or a taped movie or whatever. The law also has a specific exemption (Title 17 Section 117 (a) (1); http://www.copyright.gov/title17/92chap1.html#117) on copies "created as an essential step in the utilization of the computer program in conjunction with a machine [and] ... that ... is used in no other manner". Therefore, even though installation makes a copy from the CD to the hard drive, and running makes a transient copy in RAM, further permission from a computer program's copyright holder is NOT required to use software. Read the above again twice, and carefully. The whole concept of a "software license", except in cases where an actual contract is negotiated in advance and signed (as often occurs with B2B software sales), is predicated on the notion that even after lawfully obtaining a copy of a computer program, each USE requires continued permission of the copyright holder and therefore the copyright holder can grant that permission conditionally, and thus can specify conditions of use. In actual fact, it just ain't so. The enforceability of most so-called "end user license agreements" has no legal leg to stand on, due to Title 17 Section 117 (a) (1). Unless "license terms" are agreed to in advance in a legally-formed contract, the only ones that appear to legitimately apply are those that grant conditional permission to duplicate or adapt the software (e.g., the terms and conditions in licenses like the GPL, which have to do with how and when you can distribute copies and derivative works of the software, rather than how and when you can merely use it) and ones that don't restrict the user, but merely specify the terms under which the user might get something extra or not (e.g. limitations of warranty and things like that). Of course, I am not a lawyer, but Title 17 Section 117 seems pretty darn clear on the matter. |