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Fight Woodworking Piracy: Add EULA Restrictions
An anonymous reader writes "Ed Foster's Gripelog discusses EULA restriction on a new woodworking tool.
A small woodworking tool manufacturer, Stots Corporation, includes a license agreement on its TemplateMaster jig tool. The tool is licensed, not sold, and customers cannot sell it or lend it to others. Nor can they sell or lend the jigs they make with it. "Shrinkwrap licenses are showing up everywhere," a reader recently wrote. "I just bought a jig for making dovetailing jigs -- this is woodworker talk if it's unfamiliar to you. The master jig contained a license that says I've licensed the master jig, not bought it. The license says I can't lend or sell the master, and furthermore I can't lend or sell the jigs I make with the master."
The reader was referring to Stots Corporation of Harrods Creek, KY, and the user agreement for its TemplateMaster product. Sure enough, the Stots license says TemplateMaster may be used "in only one shop by the original purchaser only" and that "you may not allow individuals that did not purchase the original Product (to) use the Product or any templates produced using the Product..."
A FAQ document on the Stots website explains that the license is necessary because "the purpose of the TemplateMaster is to clone itself. Therefore we are verifying your honesty that only you will use the tool and you will not be passing it around to others to use for free. It is exactly the same as the 'shrink wrap' agreement that comes with almost all computer software. Please help us fight 'tool piracy'."
Please help us fight 'tool piracy'.
The only tool piracy crime being perpetraed is that the lawyers in that company are able to procreate without supervision.
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Don't buy it if you don't like the conditions. Oh, and tell your friends not to as well.
So if you break your jig, or it gets stolen, you can phone up and ask for a replacement.
I once snapped a software CD and I got a new one. Can't be much different.
The sesame seeds contained in this package are inteded for consumption by the purchaser only. You hereby agree not to plant these seeds. Help us prevent plant piracy!
This is great! Pretty soon I can go through life without owning everything, and everything I use will essentially be rented. I will be relieved of the material need to own things. "Imagine a world with no posessions."
Not only that, if I get caught breaking the drug laws, the feds can't take anything that I own since I won't own anything. Best of all, when I get tired of my wife and daughter I just have to stop paying the license fees.
I'm free! Free! Free! This is better than living in New Hampshire!
Wife and daughter... Oh cr4p. I don't own anything anyway. This is bogus...
EULA
License Rights
We grant you a nonexclusive, nontransferable limited license to use the woodworking tool for purposes of developing your new tools and cutting trees only. You may
also give, lend, or sell this tool to the third party. If you want to use the tool for any purpose other than as expressly permitted under this agreement you must contact
us to obtain the appropriate license. We
may audit your use of the tool. Tool documentation is either shipped with the programs, or documentation may accessed online
at our website.
Ownership and Restrictions
We retain all ownership and intellectual property rights in the tool.
You may not:
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Error 500: Internal sig error
Except it isn't your jig, now is it? It's their jig that you just broke and you'll probably have to buy them a new one.
But how does this affect insurance? If it's their stuff and you only license it, they should cover the costs for keeping the jig insured against theft, right?
Money for nothing, pix for free
The difference with this and a software license is that one rivalous, and one non-rivalous. I cannot loan someone my dovetailing bit without giving up posession myself. Thus, the bit is a rivalous asset.
On the other hand, software can be copied and shared with others without me giving up posession. In this manner, software as a product is non-rivalous. When you "buy" software you only ever receive a copy - the software company keeps posession of the original - so you what you are buying is a license to use.
Why not just make a backup copy of it? If the whole point of it is to replicate itself then you can use it to make a backup of itself. Then if it breaks, just use the backup... or use the backup exclusively and store the original in a safe location. Or store your backup on Karpentryzaa (har har) for secure off-site backup.
My tool has been used by way too many women far too long to make duplicates of me. In addition to charging women for the use of my instrument, I will require that they only use my hardware for personal use and not for creating pirated copies of myself.
"But how does this affect insurance? If it's their stuff and you only license it, they should cover the costs for keeping the jig insured against theft, right?"
Right. And the bank I financed my car through should be responsible for my auto insurance.
License-mania is a phase. It's happened before, and it will happen again. Western Union used to lease their telegraph machines, AT&T leased it's phone equipment, IBM leased it's computers, and so on. It will change, because in the end, it's a business model that antagonizes customers.
I just lent my son a hammer for his school woodworking project.
If anyone asks for me, I'm in Mexico.
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I might point out that the technical term for a soybean seed is. . . "soybean."
KFG
The only tool piracy crime being perpetraed is that the lawyers in that company are able to procreate without supervision.
They aren't very smart either (or, alternatively, they are very smart).
From the article:
The master jig contained a license that says I've licensed the master jig, not bought it.
(...)
the Stots license says TemplateMaster may be used "in only one shop by the original purchaser only" and that "you may not allow individuals that did not purchase the original Product (to) use the Product (...)
(emphasis mine)
So you're not buying the product, and are not allowed to let anyone who didn't buy the product use it.
Ladies and gentlemen of the supposed jury, that does not make sense.!
I worked as a cabinet maker to put myself through college. Now I am a software engineer. Sadly, I totally get this... I do not think it is an attempt to be funny, I think they may be serious.
This is a very unusual situation -- a jig making jig. I've worked with dovetail jigs before, and they are complicated enough. I would think the reproduction and resale of the jigjig would be protected by patent.
Protection of the items made with the jig (jigs) is strange. It is similar to charging a royalty for the use of a simple dovetail jig. That is, if one licenses use of the ACME dovetail jig, they must pay royalties of x$ for each corner of each drawer made with the jig and sold commercially. Of course any cabinet maker would then simply make their own jig. One only buys a jig because it is convenient. Even if an item is patented, one may make a copy of that thing for ones own use.
The real issue is commercial viability. Microsoft licenses me to use Excel. GNU licenses me to use gnumeric. I also have some spreadsheet like widgets that I wrote. In general, because of licensing, I will use my own jig, I will not use either Excel or gnumeric -- the terms of both are bad for me. It is similar for the shopowner. A single shop needs a bunch of dovetail jigs. They can buy a bunch of jigs, make a bunch of jigs, or license the jig-jig and make a bunch of jigs. Or they can look at the jig-jig and make their own. There is only one question - "which solution is most cost effective?"
I think this company will find that there is a big difference between coding Autocad or Microsoft Excel from scratch and making a jigjig. A huge difference in basic old fashioned man-hours.
A router is a very high speed cutting tool primarily used for making decorative edges though you can also use it for trimming edges, cutting grooves, rounding edges, creating tongues, etc. It's more like a drill than a jigsaw though the cutting edges are different to drills. If you've ever seen a dremel with a milling bit then imagine something 10x bigger and 100x more dangerous.
A dovetail jig lets you create two types of edges. These edges interlock to create an incredibly strong right-angle join with no nails and no screws. The dovetail shape determines the properties of the join and every jig vendor vigorously defends their unique shape. It's an identity thing. It's not magical, but I can understand why they're trying to prevent people copying their jigs.
Take note that dovetail jigs are fairly modern (as are routers). The dovetail joint is ancient (1000s of years?) but was traditionally done with a handsaw and a chisel. It takes an extremely skilled person to create a good dovetail joint by hand. The dovetail jig allows any semi-skilled amateur to make incredibly good dovetail joints in just a few minutes. Any hobbyist worth his (or her) salt has a dovetail jig.
We are living in a genuinely historic time, the age of legal technology. Now that I've said that, I better do some really fancy footwork.
The law and the individual's rights and privileges under it are among the most ancient artifacts of civilization. It is also something which evolves as a society evolves with tending towards egalitarianism in properous western democracies (the heavenly light shines from above on America...), that is, laws that take away freedom of action or that provide one person or group with advantages over others tend to be struck down or superceded by laws that create balance and that protect rights.
In a sense, you could say that some of the most far-reaching and most beautiful laws are the solutions to arguments that arise from logical problems. For example, once we had slavery, the preamble to the constitution cannot have meaning in a country that practices slavery. The argument arose and it was solved by an amendment to the constitution which clarified the argument completely: if all men are created equal, no man can be another's property. Human rights trump property rights. Slavery is illegal and slave-owners are S.O.L with regard to their property rights pertaining to their slaves. That makes sense.
At least that is how it worked in the old days.
Now, in the post-industrial age of television and the megacorporation, lobbying money and a just a smidgen of public stupidity create an opportunity for organizations to create agreements which function as devices to generate a planned result in much the same way that the parts of a transistor radio work together to produce access to the airwaves.
Laws like the ones that make the EULA possible are a technology--not one for establishing socially useful principles, but for circumventing and mutating contract law so that instead of providing a level playing field between buyer and producer, the law provides for the end-user signing away all his rights to legal rememdies by buying a thing and using it.
EULAs do nothing to protect the consumer. Nothing whatsoever. They are the legal equivalent of a booby-trap: you open the box, you open the envelope, you install the software, click on the box and BANG! according to the law, you've agreed to conditions that would have to be insane to agree to under any other circumstances.
If you don't believe this, consider the enormous tire recall of the last year or two and imagine what things would be like if the tire companies involved had had a EULA at their disposal:
'by breaking or cutting the ribbon on these tires, you agree that their purpose is purely decorative and that they have no function and no warranty, explicit or implied for any use but decoration of your vehicle...'
You can't sign away your personal freedom. You can't read a document, sign it, and become an indentured servant with no rights, but you can sign a EULA and let a company do whatever it likes to you with its neglicence.
The EULA is a device to give software makers the ability to treat software buyers like cattle. It is a prime example of how people make laws when they don't give a damn about the society that rises from them.
To mail me, remove the 'mailno' from my email addy.
"Yeah. It smells, too..."
I am actually a seed producer here in the US. On Monsanto's Roundup-Ready Soybeans, we, as a producer, must pay royalties to get into RR's in the first place. Then prices are higher for them to the seed customer (around $20/50 lb.) due to about $10 in tech fees (about $7 goes to Monsanto per 50/lb.) which we send to them. Every customer must sign an agreement (essentially EULA) which establishes that they will not reclaim GMO seeds for planting, farmers must instead go through a seed company, like us, so they pay the royalties. For signing the agreement, every farmer gets a Monsanto #, which keeps track of purchases year to year. We, as a seed processing company (a small one at that), get audited by Monsanto every so often. They check our farm records, and make sure RR seed we sold to farmers was in fact sprayed with Round-up and not a generic brand. They will also take samples of our seed to determine its generation in its genetics, so they check that we are not pirating their seed. If we were, they threaten fines of over $500/acre of produced soybeans (which is enough to bankrupt most farms).
Eat a Chicken, You know you want to.
Percy Schmeiser's web site. Percy Schmeiser is a farmer from Bruno, Saskatchewan Canada whose Canola fields were contaminated with Monsanto's Round-Up Ready Canola. Since he uses his own crops for seeds, and Monsanto's GM seeds are patented, Monsanto's position is that it doesn't matter whether Schmeiser knew or not that his canola field was contaminated with the Roundup Ready gene and that he must pay their Technology Fee.
You are surrounded by lawyers. Resistance is futile.
In Soviet Russia, our new overlords are belong to all your base.
This seems to be more of a gray area than, say, a car, and yet not quite like the "content" of a CD or DVD.
It's a device meant to produce jigs, apparently. So it's a tool designed for creating items. Now, the way I look at it, these absolutely stupid licensing restrictions have a solution, much like the stupid licensing of compilers way back when. Some of you older folks out there might remember a time when you'd buy a C compiler (for example). You'd have to give the company that wrote the compiler royalties on every product sold that was created with that compiler. It's true. Screw open source, man.
Then along came GCC. Sure, you needed the commercial compiler to compile GCC, so that version of GCC you created was restricted (legally). Then we point out the stupidity of the licensing scheme - recompile GCC with the GCC you just created, and the new GCC is not restricted. Most software companies then saw the stupidity of this kind of licensing and licensed their products with a new kind of less restrictive license. Now I can't think of any, offhand, that don't simply allow you to compile and sell your program.
Having dabbled in wood working myself (although not having made any dovedail joints), it seems to me if you have a jig to make dovedail joints you can use it to make another restriction free jig. Use the original jig to make a jig, then use the new jig to make a jig, and viola, no stupid restrictions.
It may not be as simple as recompiling GCC (because the jig creates a dovetail creating jig, not another jig that creates a dovetail creating jig), but if I was annoyed, that's what I'd do.
Really, though, it just points out the stupidity of this kind of licensing. I find it hard to believe there aren't any other jigs with less stupid restrictions.
Stupid sexy Flanders.
We need a service whereby illiterate people open all our software for us. In such a case, they cannot claim that we agreed to the license, nor could our agents as they cannot read ;-)
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one should not reasonably expect to make a living selling a product who's purpose is to replicate itself
I was thinking about dabbling in the slave trade, but you've persuaded me otherwise...
"Slashdot - News and Chat Sites Deviant". (Click "homepage" link above for details).
a jig is a tool used to help in the wood working process. most woodworkers make custom jigs for their own use for certain types of projects that they do over and over. i'm sure most serious woodworkers have made their own jigs for dove-tailed joints. this product seems like a stupid way to make money off of newer woodworkers so they can save some time. the cost is appalling. it looks like a little piece of crap thing.
please me, have no regrets.
Obviously you don't know what a contract is.
In order to form a contract, there are several necessary elements that are lacking here. There must be an agreement. From reading the link, and the links beyond that, there seems to be no agreement, only a unilateral statement from the company posing as one. Also consideration - this means that there has to be an exchange of goods or services, both parties must receive something or it is not a contract. In this case, there is no consideration. The person supposedly accepting the contract has already bought the jig, and the contract gives him nothing new - it only takes away things he already had.
To make a contract of this, at minimum the customer would have to indicate assent in some way, after having read the terms of the 'agreement' (and no, keeping and using the item he already paid for does not suffice to show assent) and also to receive some consideration for such assent. They could, for instance, offer a rebate to those who signed the contract and returned it, and then they would have a contract (and also be open to a deceptive advertising charge if they were not clear on the terms upfront.) But this? This is nothing but a piece of paper which makes a lot of unsupported claims. Use it as toiletpaper.
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Friends don't let friends enable ecmascript.
I've been looking to buy one of these soon, as it turns out.
TemplateMaster isn't a jig in the usual sense. It's a jig to make jigs. The problem with most jigs of this type (dovetailing, etc.) is that you tend to make a lot of passes with a powerful tool (a router) and sooner or later you'll screw up and route the shit out of your jig. When your jig costs $600, you're gonna be pretty pissed.
TemplateMaster lets you build jigs out of cheap materials and then use *those* until they wear out or you screw up. Then build a new one. The likelihood you'll ruin your TemplateMaster is much less since you really don't use it that often.
The problem is that you can use the TemplateMaster to make jigs out of substantial materials like aluminum that are viable for resale. Now, that's generally not a big issue - there are lots of products like that in the world - but if you make a product for production, you charge a hell of a lot of money for it since you know it'll have a limited market. This is designed for consumers and is actually very inexpensive even compared to other consumer jigs.
The mfgr is in a catch-22. He's made a product for consumers, but if it's picked up for production usage, it can seriously undermine his business.
Personally, I think he's going the wrong way with this. He *should* be making his own jigs from the TemplateMaster and selling those (in addition to the TemplateMaster), and use existing laws to block other manufacturers from making and selling identical products. Even if they don't sell, their existance should protect him, and who knows, maybe they will sell...