On Wed, May 08, 2002 at 08:26:29AM +0100, Ian wrote:

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Which is why I believe I'm not breaking the law by running one licensed copy of NT on 2 different machines, laptop & workstation, because to my mind it constitutes fair use the same way you can copy an audio CD for personal use.

I think you might have a point if you demonstrate that you are the only user and the machines aren't used at the same time but it would have to be tested in court and who knows what they might come up with.

Well they'd come up with all sorts of specious arguments but at the end of the day the judge has to simply decide whether it constitutes fair use. It seems pretty fair to me though....although I could be biased;)

Snag with the law is that its expensive so gives advantage to large corporates who can afford it.

Certainly in the US courts that principle seems to be the case but over here the courts seem to take into account the plaintiffs and defendents resources. I'm thinking in particular of the McDonalds two.

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I must write to Microsoft and ask them to sue me, might be fun.

I'd make sure your assets are transferred somewhere accessible just in case.

Do you mean *in*accessible?;) I've got no assets to speak of and those that I have are tools of my trade which can't be grabbed by bailiffs or whatever. I wouldn't mind being made bankrupt & then my overdraft would get cleared.... My understanding though is that in `test' cases it's rare for the defendent to pick up the tab for the plaintiffs legal costs even if you lose.

Mind if you could get a few hundred thousand people to take MS to court individually, it would cost them a lot. Wonder if it could qualify for legal aid? Good way of getting the issue into the media too.

I think I'll go for it. I'm off on holiday at the end of the month but I'll start poking them with a sharp stick when I get back.

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Goes without saying IANAL. I'd like to hear others opinions on the `fair use' argument I've espoused here.

Don't schools copy some sections of printed educational material and isn't that also considered fair use?

Usually its with permission and for small sections. Since small sections of MT aren't much use its a difficult parallel to draw. (Some might argue large sections of NT aren't much use :-)

LOL. The only sections that are any good that I can ascertain are the BSD parts. I think there's another argument to be had about their licensing with regards the fact that a lot of the network stuff in NT is Berkeley based (which I'm free to copy and distribute under the terms it was produced by UCL) and some of their code has been ripped off: http://newsforge.com/newsforge/02/05/07/2234251.shtml?tid=3 How do I know that the major part of their code hasn't been purloined? It might contain GPL code as far as I know. If that's the case then it's little more than a software distribution like RedHat or SuSE. I know SuSE you can't copy (I think) because it contains some proprietary code but I don't think they get upset if you use it on more than one machine. But without a full code audit of NT it's not possible to know whether the whole lot hasn't been contaminated by the GPL in which case I'd be free to copy it.

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Where do you draw the line? Why's software considered so different from other data?

Probably because it is different! In my view copyright on software should be much shorter than for books because of the speed of technological change. Books cost money to manufacture, software is distributable over the Net etc.

The whole of the law is basically a mess on this front and nobody really knows where they stand. What if you publish a program in book form? I know PGP did this to circumvent restrictions regards export of cryptographic code to countries outside the US, PGP is a non-trivial piece of code too. -- Frank *-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-* Boroughbridge. Tel: 01423 323019 --------- PGP keyID: 0xC0B341A3 *-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-* http://www.esperance-linux.co.uk/ To the systems programmer, users and applications serve only to provide a test load.