Avoiding LispWorks Personal annoyances
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From: Dave Searles on 30 Sep 2009 14:59 Pascal Costanza wrote: > Even if what you did were legal to every single letter of the law, the > question remains whether it's ethically responsible. I, for one, find nothing unethical about "cheating" a monopoly out of their monopoly rents (so long as I don't actually deprive them of something they already had, which *would* be theft), let alone merely altering personal property in a manner that does not even (arguably) result in a lost sale to some monopoly. > LispWorks Inc. is not a big corporation, it's a small company with only > a handful of people running it Maybe if their prices were more reasonable, they'd be more successful. > We are not talking about Microsoft, IBM, Apple, Oracle, or any of those > big beasts who couldn't care less about such minor incidents (but > contrary to small companies have all the money in the world to actually > pursue action). A monopolist is a monopolist, no matter how big or small it is. > So, please don't try to find excuses that what you did is actually > defensible. Be honest and say that it's not really the right thing to > do. He honestly doesn't believe that it was a wrongdoing. And neither do I. > If you do it anyway, that's fine, but please make sure that the > damage doesn't spread. Damage? What damage?? Point to any identifiable damage -- I'll even allow (this once) a lost future sale to qualify as damage, even though I don't agree that any vendor is (or should be) ever *entitled* to *future* sales or revenue of any kind.
From: Dave Searles on 30 Sep 2009 15:13 Alessio Stalla wrote: > On Sep 29, 3:37 pm, Raffael Cavallaro > <raffaelcavall...(a)pas.espam.s.il.vous.plait.mac.com> wrote: >> On 2009-09-29 03:47:02 -0400, Alessio Stalla <alessiosta...(a)gmail.com> said: >> >>> Imagine if e.g. Ford gave away cars that automatically >>> stop after 5 hours, and you discovered and applied a technique to >>> circumvent this limitation, do you really believe that you would have >>> committed a crime in this case? >> Imagine if Zipcar allowed you to drive one of their cars that >> automatically stopped after 5 hours which you were licensed to use only >> if you agreed to a license which prohibited reverse engineering. Do you >> think they could terminate your license if you reverse engineered and >> disabled the 5 hour limitation? >> >> Analogies only work if you include all the relevant details in your >> parallel. LW is not giving you LW personal - they're licensing you to >> use it. In particular, you cannot be said to own something if you can't >> dispose of it as you wish, if you can't give it to another person. You >> can't transfer your copy of LW personal to another person, read the >> license. The LW Personal situation is akin to being allowed to use a >> car, not owning it. >> >> Moreover, you don't even get to use it unless you agree to the license >> which specifically states that LW can terminate the license if you >> don't abide by it. > > Ok, very good points. My analogy wasn't correct. There is one enormous problem with a Zipcar vs. LW analogy. Zipcar is scarce: if you presently are driving a Zipcar, nobody else can be driving that particular Zipcar, and making another one is fairly expensive and time and labor intensive. However, LW is not diminished at all the more people use it (in fact, it probably becomes more valuable, through network effects), and although a particular copy of LW might only be able to be in one place at one time, the marginal cost of a copy of LW is on the order of pennies (if downloaded) to nickels (stamped disc) or, at worst, a buck or two (burned disc), versus the marginal cost of a Zipcar presumably being in the tens of grand ballpark typical for mass-manufactured non-high-end automobiles. Consequently, someone freeloading with a Zipcar is depriving someone, somewhere, of the fruits of twenty grand or more worth of parts and labor. Someone freeloading with a copy of LW (and the O.P. isn't even doing THAT) is depriving someone, somewhere, of what? Nickles and dimes? Pennies? Oh, how I weep. In fact, in the e-business world, having to pay the minuscule marginal cost for people to view and download from your web site that don't eventually convert into sales is considered to be a cost of doing business. And the O.P. has indicated that if LW even has a lost sale to him, it is not because he was able to circumvent the five hour BS, it is because LW failed to offer a for-pay product better fitting his needs. I'd consider this whole mess to be a tempest in a teapot except that it indirectly illuminates a growing and serious threat to our private property rights from the so-called intellectual property lobby, mainly commercial software vendors (like LW), the music labels, and Hollywood, here in the U.S.; these companies want to own their products even after they've sold them, to protect obsolete business models from competition, and they want increasing control over other industries, particularly consumer electronics. They tried to ban the tape player and the VCR, succeeded in crippling DVD players and DVRs, and made a credible attempt on our computers (remember the big "trusted computing" hype/flap a few years ago?) with partial success (some of Windows Vista's CPU-hogging misfeatures, since largely defanged as of Service Pack 2 and easily circumvented thank God). This will only continue until all learn the errors of their ways.
From: Raffael Cavallaro on 30 Sep 2009 21:34 On 2009-09-29 21:30:05 -0400, gnubeard <gnubeard(a)gmail.com> said: > Circumventing > the 5-hour limit for non-commericial personal use is ALLOWED by the > license. Not if if involves reverse engineering how LW implements the time limit, and of course, it does. -- Raffael Cavallaro
From: Raffael Cavallaro on 30 Sep 2009 21:44 On 2009-09-30 04:57:17 -0400, Alessio Stalla <alessiostalla(a)gmail.com> said: > The point imho is that, unlike a signed contract, it is not > objectively verifiable that the user has read and accepted the > license. Civil courts in the US use the standard of "preponderance of evidence." This means the side whose claim is *more likely* based on evidence presented prevails (no need for proof "beyond a reasonable doubt" which is the much higher criminal standard). So courts have asked themselves which is more likely, that someone who installed the software was somehow completely unaware of the license presented, or that the user was aware of the license. This is why the "hack the installer" defense is pretty worthless. The very act of hacking the installer is evidence on the side of "the user knew there was a license agreement." -- Raffael Cavallaro
From: gnubeard on 30 Sep 2009 21:51
On Sep 30, 7:13 pm, Pascal Costanza <p...(a)p-cos.net> wrote: > So, please don't try to find excuses that what you did is actually > defensible. Be honest and say that it's not really the right thing to > do. If you do it anyway, that's fine, but please make sure that the > damage doesn't spread. You wouldn't do anybody a service. It's important > that the commercial vendors survive as much as it is important that the > open source vendors do well. As as I said in the original post .. I feel this is mildly unethical, but I'm ok with shrugging that off (mostly because I know that, at some point in the future, I _will_ end up buying LW - I like it very much, I just can't afford it now). I won't distribute code to do it, because I find that harder to shrug off. I included in my post a recommendation on how to fix this problem, if the LW guys desire to do so. |