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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'."
Don't buy it if you don't like the conditions. Oh, and tell your friends not to as well.
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...
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
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.!
Well, use a shrink-wrap license, if there aren't holes in the license it should work perfectly...
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..."
No, IBM did not. You rented the mainframe from them. Nobody at the time imagined that anyone would ever want to buy their own computer, so the first businesses were all built around the rent-a-mainframe concept.
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.