"Consideration", in this sense, is the exchange of something of value. Since the EULA doesn't give you anything in exchange for the rights you give up, there's no valid contract.
The idea that you don't own software (or music) is a common misconception, and one thats perpetuated by the music and software industries (and all IP industries, for that matter). You do not own the copyright to the product, obviously. You certainly DO own the copy of it that you bought. The information is part of the value of the product, and you do have rights to it. You are NOT "granted permission" to use it - the right to use is a natural right. The right that is granted is to the copyright holder, and thats the right to restrict distribution (among other rights. I'm being brief).
As for your installer - if I buy your product (say, by going to a store and exchanging cash for it), I've just BOUGHT it. If I then hex edit or otherwise work around your EULA presentation, I have NOT agreed to your EULA, and you certainly can have no legal claim against me based on it's terms. Your only argument would be that my editing of your binary (that I bought & paid for, remember) somehow violated your copyright. Thats a very tenuous claim.
The problem here is that the commercial software industry wants it both ways - they want the convience of selling a product, but they want the rights of selling a service. You can't have it like that. If you want to sell a service, with terms and conditions on the use of the service, you need to MAKE it service, and get your digital signature BEFORE the exchange of cash.
Your last point about the GPL is well taken, and it's the same point I made about consideration. However, in this case, the GPL actually does provide something of value - the right of redistribution, which you otherwise would not have. I believe I read the article you mention, and the claim was that since GPL software is freely available, theres no commercial value associated with that right, and thus it's not valid. I'd dispute that by saying that there obviously IS value to being able to distribute your own version of a product, as all the Linux distros prove.
Thats assuming that the GPL needs to be viewed as a contract in order to be valid, which it doesn't neccesarily.
The fact that the GPL is sometimes presented as an EULA does not make it one. In fact, the last time I intalled Mandrake, it did not do this - it presented the license so I could read it, but did not require me to agree to it. I can't speak for Qt. I know a number of GPL projects with Win32 installers DO present it as an EULA (even mine), but thats not legally binding, and at least in my case it's because I haven't hacked on my installer template enough. That certainly doesn't have anything to do with the GPL.
If you agree with RMS enough to use the term GNU/Linux for the OS, then you are implicitly agreeing that the Linux kernel can be run without GNU tools (and it certainly could be, in theory). Other GNU projects don't all have GNU on them - I'm not sure why kernels are supposed to be special.
The BSA actually doesn't go after people who use software. They go after people who illegally obtain software. Now, because most people who illegaly obtain software then go and use it, it's a rather obscured difference, but it's the case nonetheless.
It's not actually illegal to use a pirated copy of software. It's illegal to obtain it. If I download, say, Office, and you're using it on my computer (or if I'm your tech support guy, and I install it on yours), then I'm the liable party, not you.
One of the requisites for something to be a contract is consideration, there is none in the case of an EULA (although there is some in the case of the GPL).
The argument against this relies on a judge agreeing that a purchase is not actually a purchase, and that despite having paid for a product, you aren't actually getting that product but simply an opportunity to license a (different) product. The other argument is that even though you needed agree to the EULA to run the software (because copying neccesary to functionality is explicity allowed under copyright law), the fact that you clicked "I Agree" anyway means you agree. I find this one a bit iffy too, but hacking the installer is certainly a legitimate end run around this one.
I wouldn't go so far as to say they aren't enforcable, but they're certainly legally tenuous.
As opposed to, say, all the lawyers who WROTE it? There's a very clear legal distinction between use and distribution in copyright law, as there must be, since distribution is a reserved right for the copyright holder and use is not. An end USER license agreement is a license that covers the terms of your use of the product. Supposedly (at this is an unclear point that has never been clarified by the courts, nor will be as long as the software industry can help it), use of software with an EULA without agreeing to that EULA is illegal. This is why there are terms in common EULAs preventing, for example, reverse engineering. The redistribution claims in an EULA are generally limited to a few lines saying don't do that, and they're not really neccesary because copyright law prevents it anyway - it's a clarification, thats all.
I'd note that the linked PDF doesn't really touch upon the case - it's about the claims that SCO is making aginst users of Linux, which aren't substantially affected by the IBM lawsuit.
An interesting question. Legally, Broadcom can't stop Linksys or any Linksys employee from restributing it. But I bet that anyone who did so would get in trouble with upper management...
The parent was making a point about not owning the songs (You don't even own the digital representations, in the case of BuyMusic), and was implying thats inferior to actually owning the CD. You made a bunch of false (not pedantically false, but glaring, factually wrong, with the wrong implications) about the ownership of music and what you can and cannot do with it. The OP didn't have anything to do with copying, and you haven't (until now) said anything about it yourself, you've said alot of bullhooey about fair use being technically illegal even if you can't be sued for it and that copyright owners can place any restrictions they want on thier work.
You need to go read about copyright some more. A copyright owner certainly can NOT tell you what you can and cannot do with something. There are specific actions that are proscribed by law. A copyright can't enforce any restrictions beyond those. Fair use delinates the limits of those restrictions, and provides exemptions in some cases. It's certainly not illegal to exercise those rights.
What you're saying is factually incorrect, so it's crap. And repeating it where other people might believe it is irresponsible.
For all the other crap that they're doing wrong, the response from BuyMusic on this seems pretty reasonable. The problem here is between the artist and Orchid. BuyMuic licenses Orchids library in good faith, trusting that Orchid has all it's legal bottles in a row. They've also said that if given details about the contract they'll pull the songs (I assume at least until the dispute is resolved), which is fair and reasonable.
The crappily implemented (not refrenced here, but apparently the entire first batch of customers couldn't transfer the files to a portable, despite being told it was possible) DRM and lousy customer support (Maybe some guy was just being an ass. Anyone have any good experiences?) are going to keep me from "buying" anything from them, though.
Actually, as per the user agreement, she LICENSED it, the name of the site notwithstanding (yes, it explicitly mentions that). So, since it's a license, not a sale, she probably has recourse under contract law. (If it were a sale, she'd have all the consumer protection crap on her side).
This is one of the biggest lies that the entertainment industry has foisted on people. It's not true, in either a legal or a moral sense. When you buy an album, you own it. There's no license. You're also wrong about the rights granted by copyright, and the limits of fair use. Please educate yourself before you spew this kind of crap.
In fairness, MS is working in this, even though they themselves fuck with it:P.
Oh, and you shouldn't use %windir% except in shell scripting, there's an API call to get the Windows directory. (Also home directory, temp directory, etc).
It'd be especially easy, as MS provides a safe string library with newer versions of the SDK. You shouldn't use Posix I/O under Windows, write a library to provide you with a single api targeting the safe IO under Windows or Linux if you need to (I'm sure you can find one already created - check the Mozilla project for starters).
Re:It's 'Most Stupid' no matter how many...
on
LSB & Posix Conflicts
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
Oh, and while I don't doubt that you know a few English majors that were good at programming, your statement would only make any sense if MOST English majors were good at programming. The thought process for reducing things to simple steps is at odds with the normal authors thought process in my experience.
You can develop.NET apps fine without the IDE - you can download the neccesary command line tools for free from MS. There's a number of other IDEs, including open source ones (take a look at SharpDevelop, which is written in C#) if thats your thing. Borland has an IDE in the works. There certainly are options. The wizards in VS 2003 certainly are comprehensive, if thats your thing. It's not really mine. The IDE has some great features but I hate the UI, which is both ugly and slow, so I generally stick to other tools. Except when I'm developing.NET apps for handhelds - to my knowledge you do have to use VS 2003 for that.
You're incorrect about needing the latest & greatest, too, although Win2003 is certainly a step up from XP - but not because of.NET. There's nothing you can do with.NET on Windows 2003 that you can't do on XP or 2k. I'm not familiar with AD, so I don't know if there's easy.NET access to it, but certainly MSSQL is fully supported. COM+ is supported through interop, of course, although it can be a pain to write those wrappers. I do wish that.NET had cleaner COM interop - it's so trivially easy to use from VB, it would have been nice if they could have leveraged that into.NET. COM isn't going anywhere anytime soon, no matter what MS says.
Last note: Yes, it most certainly is a lockin - of course, using Java is too, as someone else noted in a reply to my post - Sun is starting to make noises about that. Don't go with.NET is you're worried about that lockin. Some peopel don't care - they're already a MS shop, they're already locked in. This is one reason I don't see people moving from *nix/J2EE to Windows/.NET. But you may very well see people using J2EE on Windows moving.
If MS resisted the temptation to play proprietary with.NET and pushed it/developed it for other platforms the way Sun did with Java, it'd be a Java killer. It outtperforms most traditonal Java installations (not neccesarily a J2EE evnironment, at least not the commercial ones. I've never seen benchmarks against JBoss), it's not neccesarily tied to a specific language (although the ones besides C# and VB are poor cousins right now), it's got a better (imo) standard library, and it's just cleaner and better architectured. Which is reasonable, because MS had alot of time to look at what people didn't like about Java when they were working on it.
Note that.NET has nothing to do with the IDE, nor did the OP say anything about it. So if anyone is lacking a clue, that'd be you.
On a side note, the crap you're spewing is the exact same stuff people said about the Java nuts when it was getting started. Not that I think.NET will be a Java killer, because MS hasn't opened it up the way it needs to. I suspect that it _may_ be a Java killer on the Windows platform, but it'd be a hard sell to get a company to switch from *nix/J2EE to Windows/.NET.
Theoretically, the government is supposed to care about the citizens. The argument for pupping corporations at the expense of the average citizen is that the extra profit for the corp is better for the economy.
Now, if the corp is outsourcing everything, and then all those arguments go out the window - there's no reason for that company to be an American company then. It can incorporate in India and pay it's import taxes like everyone else. Fostering this behavior is dereliction of duty by our elected officials - getting involved here is what governments are for.
Now, there is a larger question here of whether its a good idea to prop up a local industry, blah blah blah, but fuck, econonicists(whatever:P) don't really do so hot and predicting things anyway.
I make 31k a year(after tax), my commute is free, I bag my lunch, I don't buy any electrics/games/videos anymore. My only vice is coffee but thats still only 20 bucks a week. And I barely get by. Sucks. I wish I made 60k a year, I wouldn't have to worry so much about being able to pay the rent.
Your laws may be normal, but your roads are fucking stupid. Whats with this Jughandle crap? Everyone else in the world can manage to turn left without any difficulty.
I'm pretty sure that somebodys cousins uncle owns a construction company....
Utter crap, and the sort of thing that proves this industry needs a shaking down. It's fraud to claim you're selling something when what you're selling is actually something else (note BuyMusic.coms EULA, which states "not withstanding the use of the words 'buy' and 'sell' on this website, we don't actually sell anything...".
I'd be on the losing side of a civil case if I said I would sell you something and then said it wasn't actually a sale. I don't have a problem with the licensing of music and software, but if you're going to do that, and enjoy the right to write massively restrictive contracts over it, you need to stop acting like it's a sale.
When you buy a CD, you actually DO own it. And the songs on it. You don't gain the copyright on those songs, obviously. If someone steals your CD, or breaks it so it won't play, they're liable for the cost of the CD with the songs on it - not the cost of the plastic disc. The songs are the value, and they're what you paid the money for, and claiming that you didn't is just plain wrong. Same goes for software.
Slashdot Mirror
The idea that you don't own software (or music) is a common misconception, and one thats perpetuated by the music and software industries (and all IP industries, for that matter). You do not own the copyright to the product, obviously. You certainly DO own the copy of it that you bought. The information is part of the value of the product, and you do have rights to it. You are NOT "granted permission" to use it - the right to use is a natural right. The right that is granted is to the copyright holder, and thats the right to restrict distribution (among other rights. I'm being brief).
As for your installer - if I buy your product (say, by going to a store and exchanging cash for it), I've just BOUGHT it. If I then hex edit or otherwise work around your EULA presentation, I have NOT agreed to your EULA, and you certainly can have no legal claim against me based on it's terms. Your only argument would be that my editing of your binary (that I bought & paid for, remember) somehow violated your copyright. Thats a very tenuous claim.
The problem here is that the commercial software industry wants it both ways - they want the convience of selling a product, but they want the rights of selling a service. You can't have it like that. If you want to sell a service, with terms and conditions on the use of the service, you need to MAKE it service, and get your digital signature BEFORE the exchange of cash.
Your last point about the GPL is well taken, and it's the same point I made about consideration. However, in this case, the GPL actually does provide something of value - the right of redistribution, which you otherwise would not have. I believe I read the article you mention, and the claim was that since GPL software is freely available, theres no commercial value associated with that right, and thus it's not valid. I'd dispute that by saying that there obviously IS value to being able to distribute your own version of a product, as all the Linux distros prove.
Thats assuming that the GPL needs to be viewed as a contract in order to be valid, which it doesn't neccesarily.
The fact that the GPL is sometimes presented as an EULA does not make it one. In fact, the last time I intalled Mandrake, it did not do this - it presented the license so I could read it, but did not require me to agree to it. I can't speak for Qt. I know a number of GPL projects with Win32 installers DO present it as an EULA (even mine), but thats not legally binding, and at least in my case it's because I haven't hacked on my installer template enough. That certainly doesn't have anything to do with the GPL.
If you agree with RMS enough to use the term GNU/Linux for the OS, then you are implicitly agreeing that the Linux kernel can be run without GNU tools (and it certainly could be, in theory). Other GNU projects don't all have GNU on them - I'm not sure why kernels are supposed to be special.
Thats "being pressured to pay". They're being asked to pay, with a none too subtle threat of future legal action.
It's not actually illegal to use a pirated copy of software. It's illegal to obtain it. If I download, say, Office, and you're using it on my computer (or if I'm your tech support guy, and I install it on yours), then I'm the liable party, not you.
The argument against this relies on a judge agreeing that a purchase is not actually a purchase, and that despite having paid for a product, you aren't actually getting that product but simply an opportunity to license a (different) product. The other argument is that even though you needed agree to the EULA to run the software (because copying neccesary to functionality is explicity allowed under copyright law), the fact that you clicked "I Agree" anyway means you agree. I find this one a bit iffy too, but hacking the installer is certainly a legitimate end run around this one.
I wouldn't go so far as to say they aren't enforcable, but they're certainly legally tenuous.
As opposed to, say, all the lawyers who WROTE it? There's a very clear legal distinction between use and distribution in copyright law, as there must be, since distribution is a reserved right for the copyright holder and use is not. An end USER license agreement is a license that covers the terms of your use of the product. Supposedly (at this is an unclear point that has never been clarified by the courts, nor will be as long as the software industry can help it), use of software with an EULA without agreeing to that EULA is illegal. This is why there are terms in common EULAs preventing, for example, reverse engineering. The redistribution claims in an EULA are generally limited to a few lines saying don't do that, and they're not really neccesary because copyright law prevents it anyway - it's a clarification, thats all.
I'd note that the linked PDF doesn't really touch upon the case - it's about the claims that SCO is making aginst users of Linux, which aren't substantially affected by the IBM lawsuit.
An interesting question. Legally, Broadcom can't stop Linksys or any Linksys employee from restributing it. But I bet that anyone who did so would get in trouble with upper management...
The parent was making a point about not owning the songs (You don't even own the digital representations, in the case of BuyMusic), and was implying thats inferior to actually owning the CD. You made a bunch of false (not pedantically false, but glaring, factually wrong, with the wrong implications) about the ownership of music and what you can and cannot do with it. The OP didn't have anything to do with copying, and you haven't (until now) said anything about it yourself, you've said alot of bullhooey about fair use being technically illegal even if you can't be sued for it and that copyright owners can place any restrictions they want on thier work.
What you're saying is factually incorrect, so it's crap. And repeating it where other people might believe it is irresponsible.
The crappily implemented (not refrenced here, but apparently the entire first batch of customers couldn't transfer the files to a portable, despite being told it was possible) DRM and lousy customer support (Maybe some guy was just being an ass. Anyone have any good experiences?) are going to keep me from "buying" anything from them, though.
Actually, as per the user agreement, she LICENSED it, the name of the site notwithstanding (yes, it explicitly mentions that). So, since it's a license, not a sale, she probably has recourse under contract law. (If it were a sale, she'd have all the consumer protection crap on her side).
This is one of the biggest lies that the entertainment industry has foisted on people. It's not true, in either a legal or a moral sense. When you buy an album, you own it. There's no license. You're also wrong about the rights granted by copyright, and the limits of fair use. Please educate yourself before you spew this kind of crap.
Telemarketers are as eligible for unemployment and welfare as anyone else. Tell em to shut the fuck up and stop calling me.
Oh, and you shouldn't use %windir% except in shell scripting, there's an API call to get the Windows directory. (Also home directory, temp directory, etc).
It'd be especially easy, as MS provides a safe string library with newer versions of the SDK. You shouldn't use Posix I/O under Windows, write a library to provide you with a single api targeting the safe IO under Windows or Linux if you need to (I'm sure you can find one already created - check the Mozilla project for starters).
Happy now?
Oh, and while I don't doubt that you know a few English majors that were good at programming, your statement would only make any sense if MOST English majors were good at programming. The thought process for reducing things to simple steps is at odds with the normal authors thought process in my experience.
You're incorrect about needing the latest & greatest, too, although Win2003 is certainly a step up from XP - but not because of .NET. There's nothing you can do with .NET on Windows 2003 that you can't do on XP or 2k. I'm not familiar with AD, so I don't know if there's easy .NET access to it, but certainly MSSQL is fully supported. COM+ is supported through interop, of course, although it can be a pain to write those wrappers. I do wish that .NET had cleaner COM interop - it's so trivially easy to use from VB, it would have been nice if they could have leveraged that into .NET. COM isn't going anywhere anytime soon, no matter what MS says.
Last note: Yes, it most certainly is a lockin - of course, using Java is too, as someone else noted in a reply to my post - Sun is starting to make noises about that. Don't go with .NET is you're worried about that lockin. Some peopel don't care - they're already a MS shop, they're already locked in. This is one reason I don't see people moving from *nix/J2EE to Windows/.NET. But you may very well see people using J2EE on Windows moving.
Note that .NET has nothing to do with the IDE, nor did the OP say anything about it. So if anyone is lacking a clue, that'd be you.
On a side note, the crap you're spewing is the exact same stuff people said about the Java nuts when it was getting started. Not that I think .NET will be a Java killer, because MS hasn't opened it up the way it needs to. I suspect that it _may_ be a Java killer on the Windows platform, but it'd be a hard sell to get a company to switch from *nix/J2EE to Windows/.NET.
Says who? That doesn't follow from either the sentence structure, or any of the common meanings of either "beg" or "question".
Now, if the corp is outsourcing everything, and then all those arguments go out the window - there's no reason for that company to be an American company then. It can incorporate in India and pay it's import taxes like everyone else. Fostering this behavior is dereliction of duty by our elected officials - getting involved here is what governments are for.
Now, there is a larger question here of whether its a good idea to prop up a local industry, blah blah blah, but fuck, econonicists(whatever :P) don't really do so hot and predicting things anyway.
I make 31k a year(after tax), my commute is free, I bag my lunch, I don't buy any electrics/games/videos anymore. My only vice is coffee but thats still only 20 bucks a week. And I barely get by. Sucks. I wish I made 60k a year, I wouldn't have to worry so much about being able to pay the rent.
I'm pretty sure that somebodys cousins uncle owns a construction company....
I'd be on the losing side of a civil case if I said I would sell you something and then said it wasn't actually a sale. I don't have a problem with the licensing of music and software, but if you're going to do that, and enjoy the right to write massively restrictive contracts over it, you need to stop acting like it's a sale.
When you buy a CD, you actually DO own it. And the songs on it. You don't gain the copyright on those songs, obviously. If someone steals your CD, or breaks it so it won't play, they're liable for the cost of the CD with the songs on it - not the cost of the plastic disc. The songs are the value, and they're what you paid the money for, and claiming that you didn't is just plain wrong. Same goes for software.