Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!cs.utexas.edu!uunet!pcrat!rick
From: rick@pcrat.uucp (Rick Richardson)
Newsgroups: comp.sources.d
Subject: Re: Paying for Shareware (Was: Re: v09i070: newsclip 1.1...)
Message-ID: <1990Feb13.013846.5462@pcrat.uucp>
Date: 13 Feb 90 01:38:46 GMT
References: <13986@s.ms.uky.edu> <33975@watmath.waterloo.edu> <2488@cs-spool.calgary.UUCP> <34142@watmath.waterloo.edu>
Reply-To: rick@pcrat.UUCP (Rick Richardson)
Organization: PC Research, Inc., Tinton Falls, NJ
Lines: 45

In article <34142@watmath.waterloo.edu> bstempleton@watmath.waterloo.edu (Brad Templeton) writes:

>To the best of my knowledge, these laws are new enough that no court has
>ruled on whether "you may copy for evaluation purposes only" is a valid
>restriction a copyright holder may place on copying.

At least in the U.S., copyright law (17 U.S.C. sec 106, sec 117)
explicitly allows the holder of a legal copy of a computer program the
right to copy the program into memory (load and execute the program).
The copyright owner may not abridge this right using just the copyright
laws.  This right is in addition to those rights which are granted
under the fair use doctrine.

I think if you are going to try to enforce eval-ware type limits,
you'll have to rely on the validity of the license.

Since the validity of a license can only be tested in court can we
please drop this portion of the discussion.

Here is my opinion concerning Shareware on the net:

	1) only source code submissions should be allowed, because
	   the net is a broadcast medium, and source code can be used
	   on a larger proportion of the receiving machines than can
	   binaries.
	2) All postings must be beg-ware style (as opposed to
	   eval-ware), since copyright law treats these the same.
	   Rather than have these "eval-ware license flames", lets
	   just avoid the issue.

BTW, I don't like the term "beg-ware", but the terminology has become
so confused that this term is the only one I could think of that
was not ambiguous.  "beg-ware" used to be called freeware, but that
name was trademarked or something, so freeware became shareware.
Then came the ASP and eval-ware became shareware, too.  Now freeware
has public domain connotations.  I can't wait to see what the new
O.E.D. will have to say about these terms.

-Rick (beg-ware author)

-- 
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