Re: Software 'licensing' <RANT>

[Paul Schultz <pschultz@med.wayne.edu>]

On 14 Mar 1997, Peter F Handel wrote:

> 
> Ok, I have a question then: say you have a copy of some program at
> work, and you copy it and run it at home.  Is this legal, since you
> can be 100% sure that no one's running the program when the office is
> closed?  Something tells me there's something non-kosher about this,
> but from both our arguments, it seems as if this would be perfectly
> legal.
> 

We went through this at my old job. The answer is that some software
licenses DO allow this and Some DON'T. In fact, our legal dept. and our
IS dept. worked long and hard to come up with a list of software we
could take home and load on our computers. Of course, it took them so
long to compile the list that by the time they sent it out in a memo
we all had moved on to other software (or other versions -- which can
have different software licenses!!). So, they finally bagged the whole
idea of "the list".  :-)

Paul.

pschultz@med.wayne.edu
Paul Schultz