Path: utzoo!utgpu!attcan!uunet!husc6!purdue!decwrl!eda!jim From: jim@eda.com (Jim Budler) Newsgroups: comp.misc Subject: Re: Software Development And Piracy (Spurred By FTL replies) Message-ID: <400@eda.com> Date: 18 Dec 88 20:38:39 GMT References: <555@icus.islp.ny.us> <2363@ddsw1.MCS.COM> <1334@leah.Albany.Edu> <5769@thorin.cs.unc.edu> <1343@leah.Albany.Edu> <39@microsoft.UUCP> Reply-To: jim@eda.com (Jim Budler) Organization: EDA Systems,Inc. Santa Clara, CA Lines: 100 In article <39@microsoft.UUCP> w-colinp@microsoft.UUCP (Colin Plumb) writes: | In article <1343@leah.Albany.Edu> jac423@leah.Albany.Edu (Julius A Cisek) writes: | >In article <5769@thorin.cs.unc.edu>, bell@unc.cs.unc.edu (Andrew Bell) writes: [...] | >Wait a second! So what you're saying is that its okay to pirate stuff if | >you can't afford to buy it? That's insane! Can I steal your car because | >I can't afford one myself? | | Hardly. Copyright law says that copying that is insignificant in quantity ^^^^^^^^ I believe this refers to quantity of the total percentage of one copyrighted work, (i.e. 1% of a book) not quantity of total production run. So this is going to excuse you having one copy out of 300,000 copies. | and does not impact the fortunes of the copyright holder (this is not the | exact wording, which also mentions not copying the entire work) is perfectly ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^ ^note this^ Don't you think this makes your one complete copy of word perfect illegal? | legal. While most software licences are more restrictive, this rule seems | to keep book publishers reasonably happy. | It's hard for me to picture book publishers worrying about people having guests over to sit around a coffee table with an artistically arranged group of stapled photocopies of some of the upper class books and magazines 8^) | Stealing a car is *very* different, because it deprives the (former) owner | of the use of the car. Copying (whether of a car or a program) doesn't. Stealing is stealing. The law generally uses the quantity of theft only to determine the quantity of punishment, not to determine the boolean value of "theft/not theft". So the only difference between stealing a car and stealing a program is that the value of the car is substantially greater than the value of the lost revenue/profit. | It only deprives the copyright holder of revenue. I think the copyright holder probably considers this important 8^) | If you could tell that | a person was not going to purchase something, there is no harm in them having | a copy. Of course, in this world, it's hard to tell. Most copyright holders consider the possession of a copy of their property as proving they have been deprived. Most courts consider it not relevant that the thief wouldn't have purchased. | Still, I think I | can safely say that the copy of WordPerfect I have for the Amiga (used once, | hated it, now collecting dust until I need another floppy for Fish Disks) | isn't depriving WP corp. of any revenue. I hope you have $25,000 handy. Since you have just admitted willful copyright violation. *Isn't* doesn't count. You already deprived them of the purchase price of Word Perfect. The portion of the copyright law you were reading covers reviews, quotes, excerpts for footnotes, etc. It isn't you who gets to decide if WP is deprived of income. It is WP corp. and the courts. And they may feel that if you penned one letter to a pen pal you owed them the cost of the software. And the law would say they were correct. Then they penalize you. | -- | -Colin (uunet!microsof!w-colinp) Sigh. One thing I have observed is that employees of software companies don't seem to understand the value of other peoples software. Maybe they think theirs is the only important software? Let us forget about all these attempt to set value comparisons, and get back down to the simple facts: 1) Intellectual property *is* property. 2) The *owner* of a property generally gets to determine what value that property has. 3) There are laws that force certain values upon owners of property, but they are individual special cases (selling software to the federal gov't is one that relates to software pricing), but they are special cases, the general case remains that the owner sets the value. It is his property. If you possess it without permission, all the words you use to defend this do not count. A person who possesses the property of another without permission is historically known by a simple, short word, "thief". I will repeat: "It is his property". -- Jim Budler address = uucp: ...!{decwrl,uunet}!eda!jim OR domain: jim@eda.com #define disclaimer "I do not speak for my employer" #define truth "I speak for myself" #define result "variable"