If I wanted to know about Shanachie, before potentially buying an album, how should I go about this?
1) Download a song or ten and listen.
2) Wait for it to play on the radio/mtv/etc.
3) Go to a store that lets you listen and stand there with cheap headphones trying to listen.
#2 will never happen if the artists isn't huge. #3 involves me taking time to go to a store for a chance of liking an artist, time I'd much rather spend doing something else. #1 might technically be copyright violation, but has a much higher chance of getting me to spend money.
And even if at the end of this I decide not to buy the music, who has it hurt?
Certainly not the artist, whose music I wouldn't have bought if I'd never heard of them.
Perhaps it hurts the stations and the promoters (because I didn't listen to the radio) but I can easily live with that on my consience.
I think if you examine it and quit spouting propoganda, you'll see that most people fully support the artists and will do so financially, if they like the art enough to collect more than a tiny sample of it.
Older films (like many books) lack social relevance to the viewers of today and while they may be great films, they don't move people like they once did.
If you expect a list (like IMDB's) to be the best 250 movies of all time, as rated when they came out, then of course it's a much different than what you expect.
It's much like music. I don't think music was bad in the 1930s, but it just isn't what I like to listen to. Similarly, Gone with the Wind may have been a great film (honestly I don't think so, but this is beside the point) but it was presented for a different audience and loses a lot of its impact.
Does that mean the story is worthless? No, but if the movie doesn't enthrall me why shouldn't I read a book instead?
Not only is some copying allowed under the fair use provisions, but special allowance is made for *all* copying needed to execute a program.
The GPL is another issue. You're granted the unlimited right to duplicate it. This is aside from any "first download" rights you want to try to claim. You can make as many copies as you want. These copies must be exact. If you make a copy without the copyright license it'd be a derivative work and disallowed, unless you accepted the GPL, which demands that the license be distribute with it.
But anything you can do with a regularly copyrighted piece of software (or book), you can do with GPLed software. The only difference is that with the GPLed software you can do more, in most cases.
I don't see why you should get any lenience that a car manufacturer doesn't, or why you should be treated any worse.
The general way it works is that if the product failure is your fault, you are responsible for fixing it. If it's something you should have caught and it could be called negligence that you didn't, you can be forced to offer refunds, etc, because the product isn't suited for the use you claimed.
Now, if it barfs years later on an OS that didn't exist when you wrote it, I think it's likely that it's failing because of someone else's code and is beyond your responsibility.
For the car example... If you buy it and a wheel falls off, it's the manufacturers problem. If it's simply a bit of a lemon years later, nobody is held responsible. If you have labour done by someone who isn't authorized and the car breaks in a way related to the repair, the manufacturer isn't liable.
Seems reasonable in both cases. Why do you think otherwise?
You can sell a broken car "as-is" if you say it's broken. Ditto with a TV.
Anti-"as-is" laws were created to stop people from selling something broken and hinting that it worked, or would keep working. But if you buy something from a wrecking yard, there's an implicit as-is, unless they've removed the part themselves, at which point you might assume they've tested it.
The courts ruled people have the right to time and space shift. Period. If they've come up with a new business model and claim that a once legal action is infringing upon this, isn't the fault with their business model?
If I come out with a service where you can pay to time/space shift a show it'll obviously not make a lot of money because you can do the same thing without me. Should I be able to sue people because they're doing something without paying me for it?
Eventually copyright rulings will come down to one of two things
1) Nobody has a right to anything. Any recording (at all) of a copyrighted work is an infringement and because it's possible to stream audio/video on demand (on a pay-per-view basis) any way around this will be illegal.
2) If you pay for content you own an unlimited license for private viewing of that content. (A codified version of what we essentially have now.)
I think #1 is more likely. The corps will continue to buy laws like the DMCA and soon we'll be paying a usage fee for everything.
But, even in a world where #1 was the law, general purpose computers exist and can never be taken away. (If they are, it'll be "Easy" to emulate an unprotected computer without tripping any of the watermark detectors, or whatever the main one may have.) People will continue doing what they think is justified regardless of what the courts rule.
If the courts realize this, and that it doesn't hurt the markets today, they might decide that unenforceable laws, of a generall unfair nature, are to be avoided and we'll get #2.
This is actually a problem with the word "stable".
The even numbered (2.2, 2.4, etc) builds are API stable.
API stable means that a program you wrote for 2.4.0 would run without change on 2.4.99 because the libraries and system APIs are identical.
Now, ideally they'd be stable as in not crashing, but that's never going to happen. New testing releases often have problems.
"But, it's not testing, they released it," you say.
Did you get a buggy kernel from Redhat, or Debian, or any other distro? Or did you go download it seperately and install it? If so, it's not released for end users.
This doesn't mean that those kernels weren't buggy, just that they weren't guaranteed not to be.
Stable is like free, a word with many connotations. In this case is means unchanging, not crash-free. If you want crash-free, simply wait a week and see what people have to say. (You never need a new kernel so badly you can't wait.)
Anyways, the new VM was a big change, but if the original VM wasn't cutting it, I think Linus did the only thing he could. He wanted 2.4 to be usable (if not perfect) so he swapped out a potentially better VM for a simpler VM that would work now. Otherwise 2.4 would still be unusable for many applications and people who needed it would have to use 2.2.x or wait for 2.6 which is likely quite a ways off.
Don't forget that changing the VM doesn't change the APIs. A program written for Rik's VM works fine with the AA VM and vice versa.
For starters, not everyone needs retraining. Most people do such simple things that IT can come along and replace their applications overnight with the newer ones and they're perfectly capable of continuing to use them uninterupted, or can do so after reading a quick FAQ covering any important topics. The idea that your average line worker needs an hour of training to be able to click on a different icon and enter text is silly. Few people use any features of a word processor beyond "bold".
Then with your fucky little TCO diagram, why don't you figure in boot times. Linux generally takes longer to boot. Don't forget to multiply the extra two minutes by all employees, once. (That is, if the IT department doesn't set it up at night.) Then account for the fact that Windows requires an average of two reboots (my best guess, from a few years of IT work) per week, per person.
My point is that if you let one side do the TCO they'll include only those things which hurt the other side.
Really though, jokes aside, users aren't so dumb as to be unable to write a memo in a new word processor. As long as the "print" function is labelled that, or contains a picture of a printer or paper, they can figure it out.
You don't need to transition everyone to help. Leave the Win32 programmers in windows. Leave the photoshop artists in windows (if they don't want to switch, asside from pre-press stuff, GIMP rocks). Then move all the people who use their computer as a tool to do their job, but whose job isn't completely dependant on it. (Secretaries, CEOs, Tech Support, etc) onto Linux. They probably won't really notice except that it won't need rebooting.
It's the capitalist troll again. Is this the same guy, or is there a group of Randites out there who do this?
Big hint: The US isn't a capitalismm.
As soon as the government starts passing laws regulating business you don't have a free unencumbered capitalism, you have a socialism.
The government already passes laws which benefit Microsoft (that their stupid restrictions in the EULA are binding in some states) so why shouldn't they pass laws which help other companies too?
Well the poster seemed to suggest that his company wasn't only legal, but also was legal in a way that the BSA would recognize, which means being EULA compliant.
I agree though that EULAs aren't enforceable and say things they wouldn't be, even if they were valid contracts. Except as you say, for the new laws like the DMCA and UCITA which serve to make more of that crap allowable.
But the BSA doesn't care about that, they'll still threaten you like crazy.
But EULAs aren't valid contracts, so you can tell them to go to hell, and click the silly little button to make the software you legally paid for work.
They have absolutely no right to sell you a product and then disable it until you agree to a bunch of stupid rules that they should have mentioned beforehand.
I wrote a letter to the "reporter" of this story, and the business editor, about this. I complained that they basically published an unpaid ad for the BSA and didn't tell the other side of the story, that jack-booted thugs are ruining businesses in a modern-day witch hunt.
There's an advanced trolling technique. It involves saying "I know this is an unpopular opinion on Slashdot, home of the (software thieves/democratic babies/libertarian freak) but it needs saying..."
No matter the value of the message they'll get modded up for "being brave enough to be unpopular" and modded down for saying whatever it is they say, in such an inflamatory way. Thus they get their little shitstorm they wanted.
You left out the "unpopular opinion here of Slashdot" part of your message, but it was otherwise exactly the same.
People are rightly offended at having jack-booted thugs come with armed US marshals and force them to prove the ownership of all their software. You make it sound like only a thief would mind it, so of course you get called a troll.
Imagine if the police raided your business and forced you to prove the ownership of all their furniture. It'd be just as ridiculous, but you wouldn't get trolls mouthing off about how if you're not a chair thief you obviously wouldn't mind a extra month or two of employee time tracking down receipts and matching them to furniture. So why do you feel the need to troll just because the topic is software?
They accept a car as proof that you own a car all the time. Just ask tax dodgers who get caught for spending outside their reported income.
They would likely assess it at the lowest value it could be found for, for write-off purposed, but it's pretty well a given that if you have it, you bought it.
I agree with the other poster. Post the name of your company and we'll get the BSA to audit you. We'll tell them you think their mothers are ugly, just to warm them up a bit.
I'm sure that somewhere, on some old computer, is something they'll take offense to. Don't forget that if you ghost a drive onto a larger one, you're infringing. MS doesn't permit that. And even if they did, you'd need an extra license because for a while two copies exist.
And have you really bought a new license when you change hardware? Don't forget that OEM Win 95 isn't allowed to be used as an upgrade unless you run it on the same hardware. It's really a clever way of making upgrades useless. Sure, upgrade to XP, but you won't be able to run it on your old hardware and you're not authorized to run it on the new stuff...
I'm sure you intend to stay 100% within the law, and if intent mattered, you'd be safe. But there are so many provisions in EULAs that if you were to try to follow them all you basically wouldn't be able to compute.
So come on, post your name, your company name, and preferably your boss's name, it'll save time in setting this up. Oh, a telephone number would save me the directory charges.
The problem is that they're as rich as all the member companies combined and they realize that a single failure in court would hurt them forever. They'd simply rack the court costs up for years, then drop the charges and if you survived you'd have to fight them again to prove malicious and baseless prosecution.
You're saying there are only two solutions? Either democrat, or republican? I could handle either one, as long as they weren't crooks.
Your turning this into a Bush/Clinton thing shows who's really childish.
If this Enron thing had come to light during Clinton's era we'd be calling him a crook too, this time it's a republican (Bush) who needs to toss a bunch of execs in jail or be seen to be part of it all.
A little campaign finance reform would do good. For starters, make it a crime to offer money or property of value to a politician. Then make it treason to accept it. That'll take care of it.
Gotcha, the system sucked in other countries so if we have government regulation, we'll end up like those countries.
Maybe those other countries sucked because the people in power were murderous tyrants, not because they passed laws.
It's like pointing to China and Russia as examples that prove communism is bad. They were totalitarian regimes and would have been, regardless of the label they used. It's irrelevant and proves nothing. It's like pointing to the US as proof that capitalism is good. (The US isn't capitalist, and it's too small of a sample size to be meaningful.)
EULAs violate general contract law in many ways, that's why companies are trying to pass the UCITA, they know that without it their EULAs are worthless. They wouldn't waste time on a law that didn't help them.
By the time you see an EULA you already own the software. They withhold your right to use it until you "agree" but that's really extortion. They offer your the right to use the software, but it's not theirs to offer which means they're not offering you anything. There are other issues with it, these are just the two most obvious.
Remember, they're pushing for the UCITA because they need it.
Not hard to comprehend, except that it's totally wrong.
The only thing you don't own after purchasing a book is the right to duplicate it.
You do own it, apart from the media. You can write out a copy of a book (or photocopy it) as long as you don't distribute the copy.
In my experience, it's libertarians (Randites) who insist that everything they touch is property. Most people don't think ideas should be property. (Patents and copyrights, while valuable concept, are not intellectual-property. They differ so much from property that the term is as ridiculous as the attempt to make them behave like physical property does. They are limited monopoly rights, the term intellectual property was badly chosen and hinders understanding of this field.)
I personally think they'll have to change the game to get rid of this. It's only the monster/item spawning routines that allow items to be so easily farmed. If they came up with a better way of distributing things it would help a lot. Perhaps trading should only be allowed between characters near the level of the character that originally killed the monster (did the majority of damage). That way you can't get a super weapon to a character too low to be able to get it on their own. (They could always stretch this a bit by being very good and doing it before anyone else could, and maybe have a lower character do the killing and a higher character healing them constantly, but that too can be solved - have it require certain stats/levels to be able to hit a monster...)
Also, software EULAs are invalid because they don't let you use something you bought and try to offer you something of no value (because they don't control it anymore) - your right to use the software - as consideration for your accepting. If they were shown before you purchased, they likely would be a lot more binding.
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If I wanted to know about Shanachie, before potentially buying an album, how should I go about this?
1) Download a song or ten and listen.
2) Wait for it to play on the radio/mtv/etc.
3) Go to a store that lets you listen and stand there with cheap headphones trying to listen.
#2 will never happen if the artists isn't huge. #3 involves me taking time to go to a store for a chance of liking an artist, time I'd much rather spend doing something else. #1 might technically be copyright violation, but has a much higher chance of getting me to spend money.
And even if at the end of this I decide not to buy the music, who has it hurt?
Certainly not the artist, whose music I wouldn't have bought if I'd never heard of them.
Perhaps it hurts the stations and the promoters (because I didn't listen to the radio) but I can easily live with that on my consience.
I think if you examine it and quit spouting propoganda, you'll see that most people fully support the artists and will do so financially, if they like the art enough to collect more than a tiny sample of it.
Older films (like many books) lack social relevance to the viewers of today and while they may be great films, they don't move people like they once did.
If you expect a list (like IMDB's) to be the best 250 movies of all time, as rated when they came out, then of course it's a much different than what you expect.
It's much like music. I don't think music was bad in the 1930s, but it just isn't what I like to listen to. Similarly, Gone with the Wind may have been a great film (honestly I don't think so, but this is beside the point) but it was presented for a different audience and loses a lot of its impact.
Does that mean the story is worthless? No, but if the movie doesn't enthrall me why shouldn't I read a book instead?
Not only is some copying allowed under the fair use provisions, but special allowance is made for *all* copying needed to execute a program.
The GPL is another issue. You're granted the unlimited right to duplicate it. This is aside from any "first download" rights you want to try to claim. You can make as many copies as you want. These copies must be exact. If you make a copy without the copyright license it'd be a derivative work and disallowed, unless you accepted the GPL, which demands that the license be distribute with it.
But anything you can do with a regularly copyrighted piece of software (or book), you can do with GPLed software. The only difference is that with the GPLed software you can do more, in most cases.
I don't see why you should get any lenience that a car manufacturer doesn't, or why you should be treated any worse.
The general way it works is that if the product failure is your fault, you are responsible for fixing it. If it's something you should have caught and it could be called negligence that you didn't, you can be forced to offer refunds, etc, because the product isn't suited for the use you claimed.
Now, if it barfs years later on an OS that didn't exist when you wrote it, I think it's likely that it's failing because of someone else's code and is beyond your responsibility.
For the car example... If you buy it and a wheel falls off, it's the manufacturers problem. If it's simply a bit of a lemon years later, nobody is held responsible. If you have labour done by someone who isn't authorized and the car breaks in a way related to the repair, the manufacturer isn't liable.
Seems reasonable in both cases. Why do you think otherwise?
You can sell a broken car "as-is" if you say it's broken. Ditto with a TV.
Anti-"as-is" laws were created to stop people from selling something broken and hinting that it worked, or would keep working. But if you buy something from a wrecking yard, there's an implicit as-is, unless they've removed the part themselves, at which point you might assume they've tested it.
Loss, from releasing a DVD? What?
You know, they charge for DVDs. That means that they make money from them.
Isn't this a little irrelevant?
The courts ruled people have the right to time and space shift. Period. If they've come up with a new business model and claim that a once legal action is infringing upon this, isn't the fault with their business model?
If I come out with a service where you can pay to time/space shift a show it'll obviously not make a lot of money because you can do the same thing without me. Should I be able to sue people because they're doing something without paying me for it?
Eventually copyright rulings will come down to one of two things
1) Nobody has a right to anything. Any recording (at all) of a copyrighted work is an infringement and because it's possible to stream audio/video on demand (on a pay-per-view basis) any way around this will be illegal.
2) If you pay for content you own an unlimited license for private viewing of that content. (A codified version of what we essentially have now.)
I think #1 is more likely. The corps will continue to buy laws like the DMCA and soon we'll be paying a usage fee for everything.
But, even in a world where #1 was the law, general purpose computers exist and can never be taken away. (If they are, it'll be "Easy" to emulate an unprotected computer without tripping any of the watermark detectors, or whatever the main one may have.) People will continue doing what they think is justified regardless of what the courts rule.
If the courts realize this, and that it doesn't hurt the markets today, they might decide that unenforceable laws, of a generall unfair nature, are to be avoided and we'll get #2.
This is actually a problem with the word "stable".
The even numbered (2.2, 2.4, etc) builds are API stable.
API stable means that a program you wrote for 2.4.0 would run without change on 2.4.99 because the libraries and system APIs are identical.
Now, ideally they'd be stable as in not crashing, but that's never going to happen. New testing releases often have problems.
"But, it's not testing, they released it," you say.
Did you get a buggy kernel from Redhat, or Debian, or any other distro? Or did you go download it seperately and install it? If so, it's not released for end users.
This doesn't mean that those kernels weren't buggy, just that they weren't guaranteed not to be.
Stable is like free, a word with many connotations. In this case is means unchanging, not crash-free. If you want crash-free, simply wait a week and see what people have to say. (You never need a new kernel so badly you can't wait.)
Anyways, the new VM was a big change, but if the original VM wasn't cutting it, I think Linus did the only thing he could. He wanted 2.4 to be usable (if not perfect) so he swapped out a potentially better VM for a simpler VM that would work now. Otherwise 2.4 would still be unusable for many applications and people who needed it would have to use 2.2.x or wait for 2.6 which is likely quite a ways off.
Don't forget that changing the VM doesn't change the APIs. A program written for Rik's VM works fine with the AA VM and vice versa.
The TCO troll is getting old.
For starters, not everyone needs retraining. Most people do such simple things that IT can come along and replace their applications overnight with the newer ones and they're perfectly capable of continuing to use them uninterupted, or can do so after reading a quick FAQ covering any important topics. The idea that your average line worker needs an hour of training to be able to click on a different icon and enter text is silly. Few people use any features of a word processor beyond "bold".
Then with your fucky little TCO diagram, why don't you figure in boot times. Linux generally takes longer to boot. Don't forget to multiply the extra two minutes by all employees, once. (That is, if the IT department doesn't set it up at night.) Then account for the fact that Windows requires an average of two reboots (my best guess, from a few years of IT work) per week, per person.
My point is that if you let one side do the TCO they'll include only those things which hurt the other side.
Really though, jokes aside, users aren't so dumb as to be unable to write a memo in a new word processor. As long as the "print" function is labelled that, or contains a picture of a printer or paper, they can figure it out.
You don't need to transition everyone to help. Leave the Win32 programmers in windows. Leave the photoshop artists in windows (if they don't want to switch, asside from pre-press stuff, GIMP rocks). Then move all the people who use their computer as a tool to do their job, but whose job isn't completely dependant on it. (Secretaries, CEOs, Tech Support, etc) onto Linux. They probably won't really notice except that it won't need rebooting.
It's the capitalist troll again. Is this the same guy, or is there a group of Randites out there who do this?
Big hint: The US isn't a capitalismm.
As soon as the government starts passing laws regulating business you don't have a free unencumbered capitalism, you have a socialism.
The government already passes laws which benefit Microsoft (that their stupid restrictions in the EULA are binding in some states) so why shouldn't they pass laws which help other companies too?
Well the poster seemed to suggest that his company wasn't only legal, but also was legal in a way that the BSA would recognize, which means being EULA compliant.
I agree though that EULAs aren't enforceable and say things they wouldn't be, even if they were valid contracts. Except as you say, for the new laws like the DMCA and UCITA which serve to make more of that crap allowable.
But the BSA doesn't care about that, they'll still threaten you like crazy.
Gotcha, so blacks, gays, and people who work for competeing companies can't play.
We'll see how long that lasts in court.
But EULAs aren't valid contracts, so you can tell them to go to hell, and click the silly little button to make the software you legally paid for work.
They have absolutely no right to sell you a product and then disable it until you agree to a bunch of stupid rules that they should have mentioned beforehand.
I wrote a letter to the "reporter" of this story, and the business editor, about this. I complained that they basically published an unpaid ad for the BSA and didn't tell the other side of the story, that jack-booted thugs are ruining businesses in a modern-day witch hunt.
There's an advanced trolling technique. It involves saying "I know this is an unpopular opinion on Slashdot, home of the (software thieves/democratic babies/libertarian freak) but it needs saying ..."
No matter the value of the message they'll get modded up for "being brave enough to be unpopular" and modded down for saying whatever it is they say, in such an inflamatory way. Thus they get their little shitstorm they wanted.
You left out the "unpopular opinion here of Slashdot" part of your message, but it was otherwise exactly the same.
People are rightly offended at having jack-booted thugs come with armed US marshals and force them to prove the ownership of all their software. You make it sound like only a thief would mind it, so of course you get called a troll.
Imagine if the police raided your business and forced you to prove the ownership of all their furniture. It'd be just as ridiculous, but you wouldn't get trolls mouthing off about how if you're not a chair thief you obviously wouldn't mind a extra month or two of employee time tracking down receipts and matching them to furniture. So why do you feel the need to troll just because the topic is software?
Yes. They would.
They accept a car as proof that you own a car all the time. Just ask tax dodgers who get caught for spending outside their reported income.
They would likely assess it at the lowest value it could be found for, for write-off purposed, but it's pretty well a given that if you have it, you bought it.
I agree with the other poster. Post the name of your company and we'll get the BSA to audit you. We'll tell them you think their mothers are ugly, just to warm them up a bit.
I'm sure that somewhere, on some old computer, is something they'll take offense to. Don't forget that if you ghost a drive onto a larger one, you're infringing. MS doesn't permit that. And even if they did, you'd need an extra license because for a while two copies exist.
And have you really bought a new license when you change hardware? Don't forget that OEM Win 95 isn't allowed to be used as an upgrade unless you run it on the same hardware. It's really a clever way of making upgrades useless. Sure, upgrade to XP, but you won't be able to run it on your old hardware and you're not authorized to run it on the new stuff...
I'm sure you intend to stay 100% within the law, and if intent mattered, you'd be safe. But there are so many provisions in EULAs that if you were to try to follow them all you basically wouldn't be able to compute.
So come on, post your name, your company name, and preferably your boss's name, it'll save time in setting this up. Oh, a telephone number would save me the directory charges.
He wouldn't just search for books, he'd piss on your rug and insult your mother while he was at it.
Lord help you if he didn't like you!
The problem is that they're as rich as all the member companies combined and they realize that a single failure in court would hurt them forever. They'd simply rack the court costs up for years, then drop the charges and if you survived you'd have to fight them again to prove malicious and baseless prosecution.
You're saying there are only two solutions? Either democrat, or republican? I could handle either one, as long as they weren't crooks.
Your turning this into a Bush/Clinton thing shows who's really childish.
If this Enron thing had come to light during Clinton's era we'd be calling him a crook too, this time it's a republican (Bush) who needs to toss a bunch of execs in jail or be seen to be part of it all.
A little campaign finance reform would do good. For starters, make it a crime to offer money or property of value to a politician. Then make it treason to accept it. That'll take care of it.
Gotcha, the system sucked in other countries so if we have government regulation, we'll end up like those countries.
Maybe those other countries sucked because the people in power were murderous tyrants, not because they passed laws.
It's like pointing to China and Russia as examples that prove communism is bad. They were totalitarian regimes and would have been, regardless of the label they used. It's irrelevant and proves nothing. It's like pointing to the US as proof that capitalism is good. (The US isn't capitalist, and it's too small of a sample size to be meaningful.)
EULAs violate general contract law in many ways, that's why companies are trying to pass the UCITA, they know that without it their EULAs are worthless. They wouldn't waste time on a law that didn't help them.
By the time you see an EULA you already own the software. They withhold your right to use it until you "agree" but that's really extortion. They offer your the right to use the software, but it's not theirs to offer which means they're not offering you anything. There are other issues with it, these are just the two most obvious.
Remember, they're pushing for the UCITA because they need it.
Are they allowed to make that rule? If not they can't punish people who break it.
Not hard to comprehend, except that it's totally wrong.
The only thing you don't own after purchasing a book is the right to duplicate it.
You do own it, apart from the media. You can write out a copy of a book (or photocopy it) as long as you don't distribute the copy.
In my experience, it's libertarians (Randites) who insist that everything they touch is property. Most people don't think ideas should be property. (Patents and copyrights, while valuable concept, are not intellectual-property. They differ so much from property that the term is as ridiculous as the attempt to make them behave like physical property does. They are limited monopoly rights, the term intellectual property was badly chosen and hinders understanding of this field.)
You make a fairly compelling argument.
I personally think they'll have to change the game to get rid of this. It's only the monster/item spawning routines that allow items to be so easily farmed. If they came up with a better way of distributing things it would help a lot. Perhaps trading should only be allowed between characters near the level of the character that originally killed the monster (did the majority of damage). That way you can't get a super weapon to a character too low to be able to get it on their own. (They could always stretch this a bit by being very good and doing it before anyone else could, and maybe have a lower character do the killing and a higher character healing them constantly, but that too can be solved - have it require certain stats/levels to be able to hit a monster...)
Also, software EULAs are invalid because they don't let you use something you bought and try to offer you something of no value (because they don't control it anymore) - your right to use the software - as consideration for your accepting. If they were shown before you purchased, they likely would be a lot more binding.