Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!cs.utexas.edu!samsung!brutus.cs.uiuc.edu!psuvax1!ukma!sean
From: sean@ms.uky.edu (Sean Casey)
Newsgroups: comp.sources.d
Subject: Re: Paying for Shareware (Was: Re: v09i070: newsclip 1.1...)
Message-ID: <14088@s.ms.uky.edu>
Date: 9 Feb 90 19:01:04 GMT
Followup-To: alt.flame
Organization: The Leaning Tower of Patterson Office @ The Univ. of KY
Lines: 178

greenber@utoday.UUCP (Ross M. Greenberg) writes:

|>No, that's copyright infringement, in which case everyone is required to
|>destroy their copies of it, because those copies are stolen.

|But you already claimed that you own everything sitting on your local 
|machine's disk, no matter how it got there.  Isn;t that a contradiction?

This is a misquote. I never claimed that I owned everything sitting on
my local disk.

If I stole a copy of your software, or someone else stole it and put it
there, I don't own it, do I?

|>Yes, the big difference is with the latter you gave permission for
|>redistribution or were aware of redistribution and did nothing to stop
|>it. In the latter case, everyone now owns a legal copy of the software.

|You still haven;t defined legal and what constitutes a "legal" copy
|of the software.  If by legal you mean it is sitting on your disk, then
|you must feel entitled to use a pirated copy of any code sitting on your
|disk.  If, instead, you feel that the copyright agreement for Lotus 123
|prohibits your usage of it, then please tell me what the difference between
|their copyright agreement and a shareware copyright agreement is?

How many times do I have to iterate? Possesion is not ownership if the copy
is stolen.

There is no such thing as a "copyright agreement". Something is either
copyrighted, or it is not. A copyright is your right to govern copying
of the work.

You are confusing a copyright with a license. A copyright says whether or
not I may obtain a copy. A license is a contractual agreement between
two parties.

My first point is that if you allow your shareware product to be
redistributed at will, then everyone that gets a copy owns their
copy. My second point is that you cannot allow "conditional
redistribution", because a copyright does not grant those rights, and
a license must be agree to in advance.

If a copy arrives on my system without a previous agreement from you,
it is stolen or not stolen. You can't say that it's not stolen
"only if you do this".

|How about if the program *is* shareware, but it specifically states that this
|software is not permitted on Sean Casey's machine, simply because of statements
|that you have made showing that you have little regard for an author's wishes.
|And somehow, it ends up on your machine.

Good question. My bet is that legally I own my copy.

|Do you feel you have the right to
|avenge the usage of other's resources throughout the world and, in your
|moral outrage, you'll do as you damn well wish with anything on your disk?

Avenge? What are you implying?

If it's my copy, it's mine. Copyright laws still apply. Do you really KNOW
anything about copyright law? You keep harping again and again as if I
own ALL rights to anything on my disk. This is so ludicrous that I suspect
you really don't know the first thing about copyright law.

|Does that mean that, if anything copyrighted goes on your machine it's yours?
|Looking at my signature below, you can imagine that I'm quite concerned about
|people who feel they can ignore copyright notices -- my job is based upon the
|proprietary nature of the words I write.

Being a programmer doesn't automatically make someone knowledgeable about
copyright law anymore than does being a magazine editor. 

|If, somehow, you snuck onto our
|subscription list and our newspaper started showing up in your mailbox, does
|the only thing that makes a difference in your eyes seem to be whether or not
|you specifically requested the newspaper?

You're damn right. You send me free copies, I get to keep them. I can paste
then on my walls, give them to my friends, burn them, or whatever. And I
don't owe you a cent. No prior contract, no payola.

|That, if you requested it you'll
|abide by the copyright agreement, but if you didn't you feel you can do
|anything you like with other's intellectual property?

Sigh. See above. Do I have to put it in 10 inch letters?

|>It's not a matter of "how ethical the user is", as if only ethical users will
|>be bound. Enough horsecrap about ethics. Lets let the law decide what's
|>ethical.

|Did you look for loopholes in the Boy Scout's Oath, too?  ``Lesse...it 
|doesn't specifically say that I have to walk that little old lady across
|the street, so I guess I'm clear...''

|I'm not concerned at all about the legalities involved in the shareware issue,
|for the law doesn't cover shareware distribution in any reasonable fashion
|yet.  Maybe it will one day, maybe it won't.  In the interim, I would like to
|think that there are some people in the world who are honest and ethical.

|When a person can say "let the law decide what's ethical" I realize that the
|person has knowledge on neither side of that equation.  The two sides of
|that equation are not related.

The law is there to protect people's rights. Yours and mine. It is also there
to keep people like you from deciding for everyone what is ethical and what
is not.

And while we're at it, this has nothing to do with honesty. Everyone is
telling the truth here, or so I think.

|>You aren't entitled to *any* registration fees.

|Then you aren't entitled to use my program.  So there.

Yes I am, because you delivered it to my place. It doesn't matter if
you put "not for Sean Casey" on it, because if you distribute it publically
or allow it to be distributed, then I get to keep and use my copy.

What the other person said in this newsgroup is correct. Shareware is
viable only if people want to pay, because they don't *have* to pay.

|Jane, you ignorant slut.  What was that about insults?  Pray tell, sir,
|why providing a service that 99% of the people in the world use for free
|makes me, and those of my ilk, any of the above list of unsavories? 

To be "honest", I really don't care if you run your shareware business.
Best of luck to you. But if you start demanding money from people, then
you're a crook, pure and simple. Attempting to make someone pay for something
they already own is a crime (except when the government does it (sigh)).

|Arguing ethics with a person who has none, as you've amply demonstrated
|in your case, probably is a waste of time.

Blah blah blah. So easy to say "you have no ethics" because you disagree.

|>Obviously you have no idea what I do and do not know. Your use of "we"
|>describes a large number of people whose tactics range from threats to
|>support to "you're a slime if you don't register".

|Your shoveling all shareware authors together, painting them with the
|same brush as a few you've seen would be as silly as me generalizing and
|thinking that anyone named "Sean" has no ethics or respect for intellectual
|property.  I know that such a generalization is bogus, even though an 
|example makes itself painfully more and more clear.

Who generalized? I said shareware has a "range of people". Learn English.

Once again (broken record time), read the above. I respect your intellectual
property. I don't want anyone to steal it, although I doubt anyone can
the way you are distributing it.

|Did a shareware author frighten you as a young tot?

No, shareware authors seem to think they can deliver something to my machine
and make me pay for it when it's already mine. You don't find that thought
scary?

|But there are no legal issues that I'm discussing.  I'm only discussing
|ethics, or in your case, the lack of them.  Go talk to some lawyers if you
|want to speak on legal issues.  They'll charge you by the hour, regardless
|of result.  I'm all for shareware lawyers: pay them only if you're satisifed
|with their results.

Fortunately, Ross Greenberg doesn't get to decide what's right and wrong
in this world. That's for each one of us. At least *I* don't go around
telling everyone I disagree with that they have "no ethics".


|Have a nice day, Sean.

Have a day, Ross.

-- 
***  Sean Casey          sean@ms.uky.edu, sean@ukma.bitnet, ukma!sean
***  "May I take this opportunity of emphasizing that there is no cannibalism
***  in the British Navy. Absolutely none, and when I say none, I mean there
***  is a certain amount, more than we are prepared to admit." -MP