Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!cs.utexas.edu!wuarchive!ukma!kherron From: kherron@ms.uky.edu (Kenneth Herron) Newsgroups: comp.sys.amiga Subject: Re: CDTV FRED FISH (long) Keywords: ** Marketdroid Questions ** Message-ID: Date: 3 Aug 90 13:06:04 GMT References: <1827@lpami.wimsey.bc.ca> <104482@convex.convex.com> <1-7$V$+@masalla.fulcrum.bt.co.uk> <5508@uwm.edu> <26477@snow-white.udel.EDU> <26b8e0d4.6390@petunia.CalPoly.EDU> <1990Aug3.044002.18170@IRO.UMontreal.CA> <1990Aug3.052102.18491@IRO.UMontreal.CA> Organization: U of Ky, Math. Sciences, Lexington KY Lines: 47 It always amazes me how hard it is for people to grasp the idea of public domain software... martin@IRO.UMontreal.CA (Daniel Martin) writes: > With all this, I forgot the real questions though: PD on fish can be FREELY >distributed. Making people pay, even 30$ for a collection of >360 PD discs, can cause you problem right? How does Fred Fish fixed the 5$ >fee for the Fish disks? Can he actually be sued by someone who can prove that >he had made even 1 cents on each disks? "Can be freely distributed" doesn't mean "has to be." Public domain means NOBODY OWNS IT and ANYONE CAN DO ANYTHING WITH IT. Let me repeat that: ---> Nobody owns it and anyone can do anything with it. <--- Mr. Fish can charge $1000 per disk, patch every program to say "This is a Fred Fish Production" and he WOULDN'T BE BREAKING ANY LAWS! You, Mr. Martin, could take a set of Fish disks, replace all of Fred's text with your own text, and release them as "Martin Disks" at $4.50 each and you WOULDN'T BE BREAKING ANY LAWS! You could also run off copies of those Fish disks and give them away on street corners and you WOULDN'T BE BREAKING ANY LAWS! > If Commodore is distributing it with it's machine, can people >sue them for making money out of PD (on the proof that people buy more >Amiga when the CD's is in the package - or something to that effect) ? It's not illegal to make money from public domain software. If Commodore or Fred Fish or you or I decided to sell disks containing PD software, that's okay. None of us would have to get permission from the author or from each other. Anyone else who had copies of the software we sold, INCLUDING OUR CUSTOMERS, could also sell copies of it OR GIVE THEM AWAY. Because none of us own any rights to the software. Reality check: Not everything I've said is strictly true, because not all of the software on Fish disks is public domain. If Fred Fish were to patch a copyrighted-but-freely-distributable or shareware program, he *would* be breaking the law (at least if he then put it on a fish disk). If you rereleased Fish disks as Martin disks you'd probably have a problem with the distribution terms on one of the copyrighted programs. Commodore would have the same problem, though I'm sure they'd check it out first. One last thought: $30 for the equivalent of 360 disks of software sounds quite reasonable to me. That's less than 1/10 the cost of those 360 disks. Kenneth Herron