Re: Net piracy?

[irsman@iastate.edu (Ian Schmidt)]

In article <307cd2$4vb@crl4.crl.com> dkl@crl.com (David K. Leikam) writes:

>   Good. Being offended is an excellent start.  Your problem's not just 
>ignorance, it's your pride in being ignorant, and your determination to 
>avoid any sort of enlightenment.

Ahh, I get it.  I disagree with you, so I'm ignorant.

>  It's not theft. Theft has a definition, believe it or not. You can find 
>it in your local criminal code and decisions following.  To take 
>obviously abandoned property is not theft. To take a thing of no value is 
>not theft. To take a thing the owner has clearly stated he doesn't want 
>anymore is not theft.

Sure, but none of the owners of the software have made any such
statement, with a few well-defined exceptions made possible by the Lost
Classics project on GEnie.

>  Was that simple enough for you, or shall we try to explain it again?

Angels and ministers of Rand, preserve me...

>  Howsomever, what we're talking about, believe it or not, isn't theft 
>period. It's a violation of a copyright.  For this, you can put that ol' 
>criminal code aside and check out a text on remidies. There are several 
>good ones, and they all tend to be titled, "Remedies".

I read IEEE's official guide to software copyright, as well as several
legal texts on the subject.  That work for ya?

[snip snip snip]

>   However, in the latter case, to your 'Theft is theft, plain an 
>simple', the only remaining answer I have is, "You don't know what you're 
>talking about, plain and simple".

Heh heh heh.   Theft of potential licensing and other revenues is theft
last time I checked.  Just ask any of the countless people who've sued
over movies or songs being ripped off.  Now, I will grant you that such
a thing is unlikely in this case, but if STM really caught on some of
these publishers might find it profitable to re-release their classic
games in disk image format on Mac HFS disks.

>	Ever think about why all software is sold under a license 
>agreement? There's at least one decision (out of Massachusetts, I seem to 
>recall) holding that computer code in ROM can NOT be copyrighted. And 
>that was over 10 years ago. The field's been developing furiously since. 
>Platitudes need not apply.

Yes, and that decision was later overturned (see _Apple Computer v.
Franklin_).  Back to the point at hand.  If you scanned a book in and
put it on FTP for use with a "reading emulator" (perhaps such as an
Apple Newton), would you still not be in violation of copyright and be
in big trouble?  What if the book was published in 1984 and is now out
of print?  What, you say, it's still protected?  Uhoh....

-- 
Ian Schmidt / irsman@iastate.edu / irsman@cs.iastate.edu / BAZ IS RIGHT!!!