At 17:22 04/09/2002 -0500, Dennis Tuchler wrote:
On Tue, 2002-04-09 at 17:16, David Herman wrote:
On Tuesday 09 April 2002 01:47 pm, Dennis Tuchler wrote:
On Mon, 2002-04-08 at 17:12, David Herman wrote:
I'm curious what legal authority ms or any other agency has which allows them to go into your business and disrupt it just to see if you might be breaking thew law.
No legal authority; just the threat of yanking the right to use the software.
I guess this is becoming quite OT so I won't post further after this but...
How can they prevent you from using software you purchased if they don't even have a legal right to confirm that its on your machine. (I seem to remember something about ms granting themselves audit rights in the eula for some version of nt but I may be wrong. But that wouldn't have anything to do w/ 98, etc.)
As I recall. Microsoft doesn't sell the software, but only licenses it to the user, subject to conditions. The investigations are done to check on compliance with the license.
dj tuchler
As far as I remember, there are (supposed to be) Constitutional limits on the rights of search and seizure, and only the government of the USA and the States and city and county governments have the right to issue search warrants. And they are issued on the basis of evidence of a crime. No private company has any right to search any facility under any conditions, and the only way a search could be performed, is with a search-warrant from a court. There would have had to be a reasonable body of evidence that a crime had been committed before such a search could be allowed. I am not a lawyer, and maybe there are things that I am not aware of, but I would be damned if I would let a Microsoft inspector into my house or my business. Good idea to put a password into the BIOS. I think I'll do that. --doug