You must know that you are not 'seeing its effects from more or less my own doorstep'. What you are seeing is a situation in the mountains that has a cause. The question is, whether that is Global Warming.
I cannot look out of my window and see the effects of universal state education in the UK. Every Sunday morning when I get the paper I can see the streets are covered with vomit after Saturday night, and it is certainly different from the way they looked 15 years ago. But whether universal state education, global warming, or the licensing laws are to blame, that I cannot see. To find that out requires thought, experiment, investigation.
The reason Pascal's Wager does not work, and will lead to totally irrational behaviour, is in the choice of the hypothesis. It offers no guide to the choice of hypothesis to bet on.
It is correct that if the Christian Hypothesis is correct, the bet of living a Christian life is indeed very cost effective. The problem is however that you have to pick between an infinite number of alternative inconsistent hypotheses, starting with Islam, each with similar risk profiles, and alas, you cannot make the same bet on all of them.
So we could reason analogously, that there is a very small risk of Global Cooling, but even if the chance is very small, the costs of a new ice age will be enormous, so on the precautionary principle, we should start now to take action which may be ineffective, but there again, might save humanity.
Or again, if Red Dragon wins in the 3.30, the payoff is huge and the costs small. So I should bet on Red Dragon. Yes, and what about the hundreds of other races with the same odds on the same day and the same week or year?
The problem is, either the evidence is convincing, and adequate to support action, or it is not. Talking about the precautionary principle or Pascal's Wager is just a way of trying to urge people to do things or believe things on inadequate evidence.
All over the UK there are charity shops. They sell a lot of cast off Land's End clothing. Now suppose that on the label of every Land's End T shirt it said: By opening this package and donning this garment you have assented to this End User License Agreement. This article is licensed for wear on one and only one body, the body of first wearing. Any further transfers to other bodies is unlicensed and will subject the wearer to legal penalties, fines and so on.
Let me ask you: do you think any European court is going to declare this to be a license rather than a sale? Would this really stop people buying used T shirts? It doesn't matter WTF they call it on the label, it doesn't matter what the Eula says, there are certain restrictions on use post-sale that are simply not valid under EU law. This is one of them. You did not license it, you bought it. You cannot change a purchase into a license simply by calling it by a different name. The act you performed was legally an act of purchase.
What you cannot do of course is violate copyright on the article you have purchased. That's different. Copyright does not give the seller or holder any rights to impose post sale restrictions on use of what they have bought. It does restrain copying and onward distribution however.
IPPR is wrong yet again, and in a very predictable way. The left in the UK is always conducting debates on the basis of false dichotomies. In this case the alleged dichotomy is between private rights and public resources. This is not the problem. It has nothing to do with 'public resources' whatever the hell they are. The problem with current IP law is not that it underestimates the value of public resources.
The problem is that it underestimates the rights of buyers as opposed to those of sellers, and currently permits sellers and owners to do things that in any other sphere would be considered anti competitive and abusive sales practices.
Consider, for example, why it is not lawful for a manufacturer of a car to dictate by contract at sale time which tires are used with it. The problem is not about public resources. The problem is an imbalance in the rights of buyers and sellers which allows anti competitive behaviour by sellers. It is the ability to behave anti competitively that is not in the public interest.
All we need is existing consumer protection legislation to be applied severely to media. We need a total ban on post sale restrictions on use in Eulas. So, Apple or MS or whoever would not be able to dictate what you run their software on, once you have bought it, as long as you don't violate copyright. We also need a ban on anti-competitive linked sales. So that, for instance, publishers should not be able to force the use of particular branded hardware to access their media. And we need explicit protection for rights of use and resale - so that people having bought content, should be legally allowed to play it on whatever they choose, and resell it to whoever they choose, subject to copyright.
The model is the book business. This model has served us well for years, by striking a reasonable balance not between the public interest and the business interest, as if there were somehow a free floating public interest which was not the interest of any individuals in particular, but by striking a reasonable balance between the rights of buyers and sellers.
[As an aside, you notice the same style of argument in the UK from the left in the health service debates, where the alternative to having one vast nationalised health care industry, the largest employer in the OECD, with world leading rates of hospital infections, arbitrary denials of treatment and artificially created waiting lists, is said to be an alleged US model in which the state takes no interest in the health care of its citizens. The Continental model of socialised health insurance and varied, non-state health care provision, which works brilliantly 30 miles to the east of us, is totally ignored.]
This is not legal advice, which I am not qualified to give.
I believe you are almost right, but are leaving out one fundamental thing: how you got the software. The seller has no legal or moral obligation to sell you his software apart from his hardware. However, once you have a legally bought copy, the seller has no right to tell you what to install it on.
There are a few things that people get terribly confused about, but the situation is in fact perfectly clear and quite simple.
1) You cannot install on more than one machine without violating copyright 2) They cannot tell you which machine or type of machine its to be. 3) If they try to stop you by Eula, this will not hold up. 4) This is not because Eula clauses cannot be binding, they can. 5) It is because they cannot tell you what to do with something once you've bought it, whether they try to tell you in a Eula or any other way. 6) The reason for this is that attempts to restrict how you use what you have bought, and in particular what you use it with, are post sale restrictions on use, which are not enforceable. 7) The reason for this is that they are anticompetitive. 8) They can void your warranty. However, this does not make the post sale restrictions on use enforceable. 9) They can make it technically impossible or hard to do. However, this does not make post sale restrictions enforceable. 10) When you buy a copy of OSX or XP or whatever, you have bought it, not licensed it or leased it.
Its really pretty simple. Buy a copy of OSX (with or without hardware, new or used). Install it on whatever you want as long as you comply with copyright. Similarly with Vista. Install it on any kind of machine you want. But not on more than one at once. Similarly with Office. Install it under Wine or anything else. One copy at a time.
One other poster is right about Apple. Pirating, ie copying X in violation of copyright, is stealing. Installing a bought copy on one non-Apple machine is not stealing. No-one will ever get arrested and charged with stealing for doing this. They may get charged with DRM type violations, but that's different, and they will have the defence of seeking to gain interoperability.
No, you are quite wrong about this. The purpose of copyright law is to prevent unauthorised copying of works. It is not in any way to control how works are disseminated. What copyright law allows Apple, or MS, to do is prevent you from making multiple copies which in turn leads to their ability to prevent you installing it on more than one machine.
What copyright law cannot do is allow them to specify which machine you install on. Or whether you have to stand on your head while doing it.
They can refuse to sell it unless you produce a valid certificate of purchase or product code for an earlier version. Or they can make it refuse to install unless it detects an earlier version. Or they can refuse to support an upgrade if it was not installed as an upgrade (assuming they have a way of detecting it).
What they cannot do is sell it at retail in a way that will install on a non-Apple machine, and stop you from doing that simply by means of an agreement at time of purchase. THAT would be a post-sales restriction on use. It would be just like taking home your Sony CD player and discovering that it would plug perfectly well into your Marantz amp, but Sony had imposed a post sales restriction on use forbidding it, and mandating the purchase of a Sony amp. Not possible. No court is going to enforce it.
Probably this might be why upgrade copies of Windows check to find a copy of Windows they can upgrade....?
You have bought it, you have not licensed it. Whether the terms of the software license = Eula are enforceable as a civil contract is a quite different matter. The transaction was a purchase, just as when you bought a book or a computer or a bike. You cannot turn a purchase into a license simply by renaming it. Its to do with what actually happened. In the same way, landowners sometimes grant licenses to people to use footpaths over their land. This cannot be turned into a purchase or grant of right of way, which is why they do it like this. It cuts both ways. A license really is a license and not a purchase, but a purchase really is not a license either.
There are UK cases in which this question has come up for tax purposes: purchase as distinguished from lease, and I believe software was held to be a purchase. The reason being, there were no further financial obligations or ownership rights retained by the seller. The item was exclusively held on the buyers books, and amortized and counted as an asset or a current account expense for tax purposes.
In the interesting US case of softman V adobe in the US, the purchaser was said to have purchased, and so the first sale doctrine applied, and the buyer was free to sell the elements. (He had not installed, and so the question of the Eula was moot).
If you're going to argue that there has been no purchase, only a license, you'd have to show that title remained with the licensor, who would then have to carry the asset on his books. Where are they all? We know where they are, they are in the books of the purchasers. A consequence would also be that the licensee could not sell the goods on the used market, or pass them to his heirs...and so on. In fact, there has been a case in the UK of 'used' MS licenses being sold, and copies of OSX are lawfully on sale on ebay all the time.
No chance of its being held to not be a purchase. Buying a retail copy of XP, buying a retail copy of Office, buying a retail copy of OSX are exactly the same kind of act, they are all purchases. And just as once you leave the shop, Apple cannot tell you what to do with it, neither can MS tell you that you can only run your copy of Office on Windows, as opposed to running it on Crossover or Wine.
Not a lawyer, not legal advice. If you can find cases to the contrary, post them.
You will be using it legally all right. You may be violating a valid civil contract imposed by a Eula. They are not the same thing! There is nothing illegal about violating a civil contract, though it may be unwise and expose you to civil penalties.
The problem, at least in the EU, is not the Eula, or whether you have understood it, been given notice of it etc. The problem is trying to restrict the use you make of a product once you have bought it. The EU generally has regarded this as anti competitive practice.
So, take the example of Wolf garden tools. They make handles and a bunch of stuff that snaps onto them. There is nothing to stop them making them of a different fit. There is nothing to stop them voiding the warranty on their tools and their handles if used with other suppliers tools or handles. You cannot, in the EU, sell people things on condition they use them only in certain ways, and have that be legally enforceable.
If people know different, give a few examples, real cases where they have been upheld.
No matter what it says in any Eula they sell them with, and no matter what you sign in the store pre sale or as a condition of sale, no court in the EU is ever going to uphold any action against you for using the stuff with a different handle or tool.
Similarly, Apple may make OSX unusable with non-Macs. They may refuse to support it. But if it is installable on non-Apple stuff, and as long as you have violated no other laws in getting it (copyright or anti-hacking laws) then you are going to be legally in the clear.
A company cannot tell you what to do with something you have bought, once you've bought it. Software, hardware, whatever. This is a post sale restriction on use, and there is some possibility that pretending in a Eula to have the ability to impose such conditions when you must know quite well that you do not, is contrary to Fair Trading laws.
Wrong.
(a) it would be in pursuit of and furthering competition so exempt
(b) it would not be anything like allowing you to install one copy of windows on multiple machines, which would be a copyright violation, whereas this is not.
Now, it might not be so great for Apple, but that doesn't mean you will go to jail for it. Yet.
"why Mac doesn't license its OS to 3rd parties - it tried and the effort was a disaster."
No, it never licensed its OS. What it did was license the right to make its hardware. Different. Yes, it was a disaster. Mainly because they could not or would not get the costs out in Cupertino.
Also, "While it makes perfect sense to segregate Apple from Dell and HP as not in the same market".
No it makes no sense. The only reason Roughly Drafted argues it is because they have 3% share. He is desperate for any way to make it look bigger.
Many of you are obviously in need of a basic text on post-modernism, and the late great Malcom Bradbury wrote it. It is short, witty and enlightening, It is called 'Mensonge'. It may at first sight look like a novel, but it isn't. Once you have bought it and read it, you will buy several more copies to give as presents.
What a loss that man is!
Re:My hands-on impressions of the Sony Reader
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The eBook, Mark 2
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Problem is, the model will be the same. The idea will still be to sell you books in a proprietary format and make you buy the next model from Apple if you want to go on reading them. Also, note that with the Sony you cannot lend or give books. The idea is that the secondhand book market vanishes. I don't think Apple getting into the market will change the model at all, because its basically copied from Apple. If they make the device nicer to use, fine. But the model is the problem, not the device.
Alzheimers has effects on judgment and personality of a fairly subtle sort quite a long time before the symptoms are so severe that you would start thinking the sufferer is 'demented'. As the mental functions deteriorate, people become quite expert at covering. There is a stage at which you can feel that the person is becoming a sort of shell of stereotypical responses, and have also the feeling that they're denying real contact. Actually what is happening is that they can no longer function in the relationship, its just gone, but they do have the ability to produce more or less appropriate social gestures.
So probably quite a bit before 1994, Mr Noorda's performance was substantially affected by his illness.
That is, if you have reverse engineered the encryption process to produce FairPlay files from mp3s, does it follow that you can also trivially implement decryption to play them back? I'm not clear whether what he has done only enables other stores to sell iTunes compatible material, or whether it also is going to enable other manufacturers to play back iTunes material.
You need to ask why free trade and open markets used to be good for the US middle classes, and now seem to be bad.
Its not due to the 'assault' on them alleged in the article. Its down to two things the article does not talk about. Its a combination of two massively expensive wars happening at the same time as the largest credit bubble in history. Its not outsourcing either. The pressures which result in outsourcing would just result in layoffs were outsourcing not available.
The only coherent account of the enviroment in which we find ourselves, its consequences and likely end game, is by the Austrian school economists, and it makes depressing reading, because we have probably passed the point of no return, bad debt and malinvestment now being so huge that it cannot be liquidated without extreme pain. Pain so considerable that the loss of IT jobs will seem like a pinprick.
The authors spend a lot of time blaming companies. The Austrians point out that you have to ask yourself when you hear this what changed? Why do the same managers at different points in the cycle suddenly lose their ability to forecast and invest reasonably? Why do the same managers who previously hired locally suddenly find it to their advantage to outsource?
It is not open markets that have changed. Its the world in which they operate and the country we live in that's changed.
The concept of 'public services' just means in this context 'nationalised service industry'.
The BBC is just a state owned broadcaster. It is no different from CBS or NBC or NPR. Or, in Holland, VARA or VPRO. Its just that it happens to be state owned.
I would still have problems were it funded out of general taxation, as schools are in the UK. But it would be a different problem. I would not believe that there should be a state broadcaster funded out of general taxation. But that is not what is happening here. What is happening here is that the State is forbidding people access to broadcast information, defined by the European Charter as a basic human right, unless they subscribe to the State Broadcaster. And it is putting people in jail for violating this demand.
This is a basic human rights violation, in a way that funding out of general taxation would not be, or would not be in the same way. It is totally wrong. And, to return to the original thread, we should be deeply suspicious when an institution founded and funded on such totally morally indefensible principles links up with a company like MS, which has been found by courts to have a similarly cavalier approach to competition and freedom and such things.
In the chorus of 'I likes' and 'I don't likes' that followed on the original post, no-one has answered the main question, which is a question about human rights.
Why should people who want to watch TV, but who do not want to watch the BBC, be obliged by law to fund the BBC in order to be able to watch TV?
This has nothing to do with whether its a great British institution, whether British TV is better than US TV, and its nothing like general taxation, and especially nothing like the road tax. And no, it is not a small amount of money in the UK, otherwise so many poor people would not end up in court over it. And no it is not trolling.
Why is this different from being obliged to buy Windows on pain of committing a criminal offense when you use a computer? Or it being a criminal offense to read a newspaper without subscribing to the NYT? Or eating beef without subscribing to the State Fish and Chips service? Why is it OK to compel people to subscribe to the State TV service in order to have the legal right to watch TV at all?
You need to understand who the BBC is and how it is funded. In the UK it is illegal (it is actually a criminal offense) to watch TV unless you, in effect, subscribe to the UK State Broadcaster. This is done by means of the so called 'license fee' - a license to watch TV, all of the receipts from which go to the BBC.
As a result, one of the main activities of magistrates courts in the UK is to jail single mothers for not subscribing to the BBC. One conjectures that neither these ladies nor their children have the slightest interest in watching the BBC, but they will pay for it anyway, and if not, go to jail.
The fee is not small. It is well north of $150 a year. It rises every year, faster than inflation. It is probably one of the most regressive taxes ever devised, and falls most heavily on those who can least afford it.
The BBC then spends substantial amounts of this money to go into new businesses which are already perfectly well covered by the private sector, and it usually succeeds owing to its ability to do cross marketing - magazines linked to shows. So the UK State Broadcaster is also the UK State Magazine Publisher, and is the largest magazine publisher in the UK.
Now we read that the BBC is to strike a strategic agreement with Microsoft. Will anyone be in the least surprised when this turns out to be a vehicle for further attempts to raise the license fee still further, and to extend the BBC's activities still further?
What we in the UK need more than anything is to make subscription to the State Broadcaster optional, and to stop jailing poor people for the crime of wanting to watch some other TV channels, while not subscribing to it.
It is as if, in the US, you were obliged to buy a copy of the NY Times, or commit a criminal offense every time you read a newspaper. It is as if you could only buy a PC with Windows on it. These are the same people, with the same basic attitudes: compulsion is good.
Its called the end-to-end model, as popularized by Walt Mossberg. You see, the iPod was designed to work well with the iTunes software and the store. It was also designed to work well with the Mac. In turn, the Mac consists of an OS which is designed to work optimally with its hardware. This is totally unlike the Microsoft component model, which is basically a mix and match model, get your hardware where you want. The end-to-end model had a short eclipse, but is now coming back.
Well, the currency issue is all part of this, as are ebook readers. Pretty soon all stores will have their own currencies which will be designed to work best with their stores. All bookstores will have their own ebook readers which will work optimally with their own ebooks. Alas, these ebooks will not be readable on any other reader, just as the tunes are not playable on other players, and of course the currencies will not be usable except in the store that issued them.
However, this is all good news, as it is delivering a better customer experience, because it is end-to-end.
If the case shows positive NPV over the life of the project, it is not predatory even if it loses money this year. Almost all projects of this kind have negative cash flow in their first year. So what?
Basically tben we have the iPod/iTunes model. The hope is to have a virtuous circle between store and player. Once you have a few books bought from the store, you are locked into the player unless you buy them again. You are also locked into the store, since DRMd books from other stores will not be readable on your player. The download software is out of your control in terms of what it does or reveals about the PC on which it is installed, and you need that in order to work efficiently with the player.
Like the iPod/iTunes model, this is something anyone seriously committed to intellectual freedom will boycott.
Its a good question. The four questions about it are:
1) Can you read your own books in native mode, and get them in and out using normal file transfer tools?
2) Can you read books bought at the store on other readers?
3) Can you read other ebooks bought at other stores on it?
4) Can you buy the ebooks using an ordinary web browser or do you have to use proprietary software?
Otherwise we are headed down towards a rather familiar place. In this place you are locked into both bookstore, reader and download/management software, and have given up the ability you currently have with both books and cds, to buy them in a variety of ways, from a variety of people, and play/read them on a variety of devices. Which is bad enough in music, but when it comes to books, its truly terrible.
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You must know that you are not 'seeing its effects from more or less my own doorstep'. What you are seeing is a situation in the mountains that has a cause. The question is, whether that is Global Warming.
I cannot look out of my window and see the effects of universal state education in the UK. Every Sunday morning when I get the paper I can see the streets are covered with vomit after Saturday night, and it is certainly different from the way they looked 15 years ago. But whether universal state education, global warming, or the licensing laws are to blame, that I cannot see. To find that out requires thought, experiment, investigation.
The reason Pascal's Wager does not work, and will lead to totally irrational behaviour, is in the choice of the hypothesis. It offers no guide to the choice of hypothesis to bet on.
It is correct that if the Christian Hypothesis is correct, the bet of living a Christian life is indeed very cost effective. The problem is however that you have to pick between an infinite number of alternative inconsistent hypotheses, starting with Islam, each with similar risk profiles, and alas, you cannot make the same bet on all of them.
So we could reason analogously, that there is a very small risk of Global Cooling, but even if the chance is very small, the costs of a new ice age will be enormous, so on the precautionary principle, we should start now to take action which may be ineffective, but there again, might save humanity.
Or again, if Red Dragon wins in the 3.30, the payoff is huge and the costs small. So I should bet on Red Dragon. Yes, and what about the hundreds of other races with the same odds on the same day and the same week or year?
The problem is, either the evidence is convincing, and adequate to support action, or it is not. Talking about the precautionary principle or Pascal's Wager is just a way of trying to urge people to do things or believe things on inadequate evidence.
All over the UK there are charity shops. They sell a lot of cast off Land's End clothing. Now suppose that on the label of every Land's End T shirt it said: By opening this package and donning this garment you have assented to this End User License Agreement. This article is licensed for wear on one and only one body, the body of first wearing. Any further transfers to other bodies is unlicensed and will subject the wearer to legal penalties, fines and so on.
Let me ask you: do you think any European court is going to declare this to be a license rather than a sale? Would this really stop people buying used T shirts? It doesn't matter WTF they call it on the label, it doesn't matter what the Eula says, there are certain restrictions on use post-sale that are simply not valid under EU law. This is one of them. You did not license it, you bought it. You cannot change a purchase into a license simply by calling it by a different name. The act you performed was legally an act of purchase.
What you cannot do of course is violate copyright on the article you have purchased. That's different. Copyright does not give the seller or holder any rights to impose post sale restrictions on use of what they have bought. It does restrain copying and onward distribution however.
IPPR is wrong yet again, and in a very predictable way. The left in the UK is always conducting debates on the basis of false dichotomies. In this case the alleged dichotomy is between private rights and public resources. This is not the problem. It has nothing to do with 'public resources' whatever the hell they are. The problem with current IP law is not that it underestimates the value of public resources.
The problem is that it underestimates the rights of buyers as opposed to those of sellers, and currently permits sellers and owners to do things that in any other sphere would be considered anti competitive and abusive sales practices.
Consider, for example, why it is not lawful for a manufacturer of a car to dictate by contract at sale time which tires are used with it. The problem is not about public resources. The problem is an imbalance in the rights of buyers and sellers which allows anti competitive behaviour by sellers. It is the ability to behave anti competitively that is not in the public interest.
All we need is existing consumer protection legislation to be applied severely to media. We need a total ban on post sale restrictions on use in Eulas. So, Apple or MS or whoever would not be able to dictate what you run their software on, once you have bought it, as long as you don't violate copyright. We also need a ban on anti-competitive linked sales. So that, for instance, publishers should not be able to force the use of particular branded hardware to access their media. And we need explicit protection for rights of use and resale - so that people having bought content, should be legally allowed to play it on whatever they choose, and resell it to whoever they choose, subject to copyright.
The model is the book business. This model has served us well for years, by striking a reasonable balance not between the public interest and the business interest, as if there were somehow a free floating public interest which was not the interest of any individuals in particular, but by striking a reasonable balance between the rights of buyers and sellers.
[As an aside, you notice the same style of argument in the UK from the left in the health service debates, where the alternative to having one vast nationalised health care industry, the largest employer in the OECD, with world leading rates of hospital infections, arbitrary denials of treatment and artificially created waiting lists, is said to be an alleged US model in which the state takes no interest in the health care of its citizens. The Continental model of socialised health insurance and varied, non-state health care provision, which works brilliantly 30 miles to the east of us, is totally ignored.]
This is not legal advice, which I am not qualified to give.
I believe you are almost right, but are leaving out one fundamental thing: how you got the software. The seller has no legal or moral obligation to sell you his software apart from his hardware. However, once you have a legally bought copy, the seller has no right to tell you what to install it on.
There are a few things that people get terribly confused about, but the situation is in fact perfectly clear and quite simple.
1) You cannot install on more than one machine without violating copyright
2) They cannot tell you which machine or type of machine its to be.
3) If they try to stop you by Eula, this will not hold up.
4) This is not because Eula clauses cannot be binding, they can.
5) It is because they cannot tell you what to do with something once you've bought it, whether they try to tell you in a Eula or any other way.
6) The reason for this is that attempts to restrict how you use what you have bought, and in particular what you use it with, are post sale restrictions on use, which are not enforceable.
7) The reason for this is that they are anticompetitive.
8) They can void your warranty. However, this does not make the post sale restrictions on use enforceable.
9) They can make it technically impossible or hard to do. However, this does not make post sale restrictions enforceable.
10) When you buy a copy of OSX or XP or whatever, you have bought it, not licensed it or leased it.
Its really pretty simple. Buy a copy of OSX (with or without hardware, new or used). Install it on whatever you want as long as you comply with copyright. Similarly with Vista. Install it on any kind of machine you want. But not on more than one at once. Similarly with Office. Install it under Wine or anything else. One copy at a time.
One other poster is right about Apple. Pirating, ie copying X in violation of copyright, is stealing. Installing a bought copy on one non-Apple machine is not stealing. No-one will ever get arrested and charged with stealing for doing this. They may get charged with DRM type violations, but that's different, and they will have the defence of seeking to gain interoperability.
No, you are quite wrong about this. The purpose of copyright law is to prevent unauthorised copying of works. It is not in any way to control how works are disseminated. What copyright law allows Apple, or MS, to do is prevent you from making multiple copies which in turn leads to their ability to prevent you installing it on more than one machine.
What copyright law cannot do is allow them to specify which machine you install on. Or whether you have to stand on your head while doing it.
Argument is not correct.
They can refuse to sell it unless you produce a valid certificate of purchase or product code for an earlier version. Or they can make it refuse to install unless it detects an earlier version. Or they can refuse to support an upgrade if it was not installed as an upgrade (assuming they have a way of detecting it).
What they cannot do is sell it at retail in a way that will install on a non-Apple machine, and stop you from doing that simply by means of an agreement at time of purchase. THAT would be a post-sales restriction on use. It would be just like taking home your Sony CD player and discovering that it would plug perfectly well into your Marantz amp, but Sony had imposed a post sales restriction on use forbidding it, and mandating the purchase of a Sony amp. Not possible. No court is going to enforce it.
Probably this might be why upgrade copies of Windows check to find a copy of Windows they can upgrade....?
You have bought it, you have not licensed it. Whether the terms of the software license = Eula are enforceable as a civil contract is a quite different matter. The transaction was a purchase, just as when you bought a book or a computer or a bike. You cannot turn a purchase into a license simply by renaming it. Its to do with what actually happened. In the same way, landowners sometimes grant licenses to people to use footpaths over their land. This cannot be turned into a purchase or grant of right of way, which is why they do it like this. It cuts both ways. A license really is a license and not a purchase, but a purchase really is not a license either.
There are UK cases in which this question has come up for tax purposes: purchase as distinguished from lease, and I believe software was held to be a purchase. The reason being, there were no further financial obligations or ownership rights retained by the seller. The item was exclusively held on the buyers books, and amortized and counted as an asset or a current account expense for tax purposes.
In the interesting US case of softman V adobe in the US, the purchaser was said to have purchased, and so the first sale doctrine applied, and the buyer was free to sell the elements. (He had not installed, and so the question of the Eula was moot).
If you're going to argue that there has been no purchase, only a license, you'd have to show that title remained with the licensor, who would then have to carry the asset on his books. Where are they all? We know where they are, they are in the books of the purchasers. A consequence would also be that the licensee could not sell the goods on the used market, or pass them to his heirs...and so on. In fact, there has been a case in the UK of 'used' MS licenses being sold, and copies of OSX are lawfully on sale on ebay all the time.
No chance of its being held to not be a purchase. Buying a retail copy of XP, buying a retail copy of Office, buying a retail copy of OSX are exactly the same kind of act, they are all purchases. And just as once you leave the shop, Apple cannot tell you what to do with it, neither can MS tell you that you can only run your copy of Office on Windows, as opposed to running it on Crossover or Wine.
Not a lawyer, not legal advice. If you can find cases to the contrary, post them.
You keep on making the same mistake.
You will be using it legally all right. You may be violating a valid civil contract imposed by a Eula. They are not the same thing! There is nothing illegal about violating a civil contract, though it may be unwise and expose you to civil penalties.
The problem, at least in the EU, is not the Eula, or whether you have understood it, been given notice of it etc. The problem is trying to restrict the use you make of a product once you have bought it. The EU generally has regarded this as anti competitive practice.
So, take the example of Wolf garden tools. They make handles and a bunch of stuff that snaps onto them. There is nothing to stop them making them of a different fit. There is nothing to stop them voiding the warranty on their tools and their handles if used with other suppliers tools or handles. You cannot, in the EU, sell people things on condition they use them only in certain ways, and have that be legally enforceable.
If people know different, give a few examples, real cases where they have been upheld.
No matter what it says in any Eula they sell them with, and no matter what you sign in the store pre sale or as a condition of sale, no court in the EU is ever going to uphold any action against you for using the stuff with a different handle or tool.
Similarly, Apple may make OSX unusable with non-Macs. They may refuse to support it. But if it is installable on non-Apple stuff, and as long as you have violated no other laws in getting it (copyright or anti-hacking laws) then you are going to be legally in the clear.
A company cannot tell you what to do with something you have bought, once you've bought it. Software, hardware, whatever. This is a post sale restriction on use, and there is some possibility that pretending in a Eula to have the ability to impose such conditions when you must know quite well that you do not, is contrary to Fair Trading laws.
This is not legal advice. I am not a lawyer.
Wrong. (a) it would be in pursuit of and furthering competition so exempt (b) it would not be anything like allowing you to install one copy of windows on multiple machines, which would be a copyright violation, whereas this is not. Now, it might not be so great for Apple, but that doesn't mean you will go to jail for it. Yet.
"why Mac doesn't license its OS to 3rd parties - it tried and the effort was a disaster."
No, it never licensed its OS. What it did was license the right to make its hardware. Different. Yes, it was a disaster. Mainly because they could not or would not get the costs out in Cupertino.
Also, "While it makes perfect sense to segregate Apple from Dell and HP as not in the same market".
No it makes no sense. The only reason Roughly Drafted argues it is because they have 3% share. He is desperate for any way to make it look bigger.
Many of you are obviously in need of a basic text on post-modernism, and the late great Malcom Bradbury wrote it. It is short, witty and enlightening, It is called 'Mensonge'. It may at first sight look like a novel, but it isn't. Once you have bought it and read it, you will buy several more copies to give as presents.
What a loss that man is!
Problem is, the model will be the same. The idea will still be to sell you books in a proprietary format and make you buy the next model from Apple if you want to go on reading them. Also, note that with the Sony you cannot lend or give books. The idea is that the secondhand book market vanishes. I don't think Apple getting into the market will change the model at all, because its basically copied from Apple. If they make the device nicer to use, fine. But the model is the problem, not the device.
Alzheimers has effects on judgment and personality of a fairly subtle sort quite a long time before the symptoms are so severe that you would start thinking the sufferer is 'demented'. As the mental functions deteriorate, people become quite expert at covering. There is a stage at which you can feel that the person is becoming a sort of shell of stereotypical responses, and have also the feeling that they're denying real contact. Actually what is happening is that they can no longer function in the relationship, its just gone, but they do have the ability to produce more or less appropriate social gestures.
So probably quite a bit before 1994, Mr Noorda's performance was substantially affected by his illness.
A terrible fate for a gifted individual.
That is, if you have reverse engineered the encryption process to produce FairPlay files from mp3s, does it follow that you can also trivially implement decryption to play them back? I'm not clear whether what he has done only enables other stores to sell iTunes compatible material, or whether it also is going to enable other manufacturers to play back iTunes material.
You need to ask why free trade and open markets used to be good for the US middle classes, and now seem to be bad.
Its not due to the 'assault' on them alleged in the article. Its down to two things the article does not talk about. Its a combination of two massively expensive wars happening at the same time as the largest credit bubble in history. Its not outsourcing either. The pressures which result in outsourcing would just result in layoffs were outsourcing not available.
The only coherent account of the enviroment in which we find ourselves, its consequences and likely end game, is by the Austrian school economists, and it makes depressing reading, because we have probably passed the point of no return, bad debt and malinvestment now being so huge that it cannot be liquidated without extreme pain. Pain so considerable that the loss of IT jobs will seem like a pinprick.
The authors spend a lot of time blaming companies. The Austrians point out that you have to ask yourself when you hear this what changed? Why do the same managers at different points in the cycle suddenly lose their ability to forecast and invest reasonably? Why do the same managers who previously hired locally suddenly find it to their advantage to outsource?
It is not open markets that have changed. Its the world in which they operate and the country we live in that's changed.
The concept of 'public services' just means in this context 'nationalised service industry'. The BBC is just a state owned broadcaster. It is no different from CBS or NBC or NPR. Or, in Holland, VARA or VPRO. Its just that it happens to be state owned. I would still have problems were it funded out of general taxation, as schools are in the UK. But it would be a different problem. I would not believe that there should be a state broadcaster funded out of general taxation. But that is not what is happening here. What is happening here is that the State is forbidding people access to broadcast information, defined by the European Charter as a basic human right, unless they subscribe to the State Broadcaster. And it is putting people in jail for violating this demand. This is a basic human rights violation, in a way that funding out of general taxation would not be, or would not be in the same way. It is totally wrong. And, to return to the original thread, we should be deeply suspicious when an institution founded and funded on such totally morally indefensible principles links up with a company like MS, which has been found by courts to have a similarly cavalier approach to competition and freedom and such things.
Why should people who want to watch TV, but who do not want to watch the BBC, be obliged by law to fund the BBC in order to be able to watch TV?
This has nothing to do with whether its a great British institution, whether British TV is better than US TV, and its nothing like general taxation, and especially nothing like the road tax. And no, it is not a small amount of money in the UK, otherwise so many poor people would not end up in court over it. And no it is not trolling.
Why is this different from being obliged to buy Windows on pain of committing a criminal offense when you use a computer? Or it being a criminal offense to read a newspaper without subscribing to the NYT? Or eating beef without subscribing to the State Fish and Chips service? Why is it OK to compel people to subscribe to the State TV service in order to have the legal right to watch TV at all?
You need to understand who the BBC is and how it is funded. In the UK it is illegal (it is actually a criminal offense) to watch TV unless you, in effect, subscribe to the UK State Broadcaster. This is done by means of the so called 'license fee' - a license to watch TV, all of the receipts from which go to the BBC.
As a result, one of the main activities of magistrates courts in the UK is to jail single mothers for not subscribing to the BBC. One conjectures that neither these ladies nor their children have the slightest interest in watching the BBC, but they will pay for it anyway, and if not, go to jail.
The fee is not small. It is well north of $150 a year. It rises every year, faster than inflation. It is probably one of the most regressive taxes ever devised, and falls most heavily on those who can least afford it.
The BBC then spends substantial amounts of this money to go into new businesses which are already perfectly well covered by the private sector, and it usually succeeds owing to its ability to do cross marketing - magazines linked to shows. So the UK State Broadcaster is also the UK State Magazine Publisher, and is the largest magazine publisher in the UK.
Now we read that the BBC is to strike a strategic agreement with Microsoft. Will anyone be in the least surprised when this turns out to be a vehicle for further attempts to raise the license fee still further, and to extend the BBC's activities still further?
What we in the UK need more than anything is to make subscription to the State Broadcaster optional, and to stop jailing poor people for the crime of wanting to watch some other TV channels, while not subscribing to it.
It is as if, in the US, you were obliged to buy a copy of the NY Times, or commit a criminal offense every time you read a newspaper. It is as if you could only buy a PC with Windows on it. These are the same people, with the same basic attitudes: compulsion is good.
Its called the end-to-end model, as popularized by Walt Mossberg. You see, the iPod was designed to work well with the iTunes software and the store. It was also designed to work well with the Mac. In turn, the Mac consists of an OS which is designed to work optimally with its hardware. This is totally unlike the Microsoft component model, which is basically a mix and match model, get your hardware where you want. The end-to-end model had a short eclipse, but is now coming back. Well, the currency issue is all part of this, as are ebook readers. Pretty soon all stores will have their own currencies which will be designed to work best with their stores. All bookstores will have their own ebook readers which will work optimally with their own ebooks. Alas, these ebooks will not be readable on any other reader, just as the tunes are not playable on other players, and of course the currencies will not be usable except in the store that issued them. However, this is all good news, as it is delivering a better customer experience, because it is end-to-end.
If the case shows positive NPV over the life of the project, it is not predatory even if it loses money this year. Almost all projects of this kind have negative cash flow in their first year. So what?
Basically tben we have the iPod/iTunes model. The hope is to have a virtuous circle between store and player. Once you have a few books bought from the store, you are locked into the player unless you buy them again. You are also locked into the store, since DRMd books from other stores will not be readable on your player. The download software is out of your control in terms of what it does or reveals about the PC on which it is installed, and you need that in order to work efficiently with the player.
Like the iPod/iTunes model, this is something anyone seriously committed to intellectual freedom will boycott.
Its a good question. The four questions about it are:
1) Can you read your own books in native mode, and get them in and out using normal file transfer tools?
2) Can you read books bought at the store on other readers?
3) Can you read other ebooks bought at other stores on it?
4) Can you buy the ebooks using an ordinary web browser or do you have to use proprietary software?
Otherwise we are headed down towards a rather familiar place. In this place you are locked into both bookstore, reader and download/management software, and have given up the ability you currently have with both books and cds, to buy them in a variety of ways, from a variety of people, and play/read them on a variety of devices. Which is bad enough in music, but when it comes to books, its truly terrible.
Yes you are quite right, its as binding without a signature as with. Its a law of the land, not a civil contract or any kind of contract.
On Tomlinson - are there actually any disclosures in his novel? It is most probably a publicity stunt.