On Wednesday 08 May 2002 9:38 am, Mark Evans wrote:
MS's EULA is also complete garbage and isn't worth the paper it's written on. They should cut to the quick and just provide a disclaimer that their software comes with no warranty whatsoever & is only protected by copyright in law. My understanding is that copyrighted material is for fair use and the person who sells it to you can't then impose conditions on you that will prohibit it's fair use. In fact it applies to anything you buy doesn't it?
The conditions Microsoft are trying to impose arn't even about use. They are in effect about resale. As if you had a book which tried to impose conditions on selling it to a secondhand bookshop or even on giving it to a jumble sale... Book publishers lost quite a few court cases over this in the early 20th century.
I think that you will find that either current or proposed law does control the resale of even loaning of copyrighted books - effectively making second-hand book shops and evel libraries illegal. Sorry, but I don't have any actual details on this, but I'm sure it came up on WYLUG or the schools list a while back.
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.
According to the letter of current UK copyright law you cannot do either. Even though several law lords agree that the current law is both daft and unenforcable parliment dosn't appear much interested in doing anything about it.
There are some firms out there who will let you do this, such as Borland. They were quite happy or me to install Delphi 3 on as many PC's as I wanted provided that there was only every one copy in use at any one time. However, this was in their ELUA, and is not common practice elsewhere.
Don't schools copy some sections of printed educational material and isn't that also considered fair use? Where do you draw the line? Why's
That's because the copyright holders collectivly grant such a licence.
software considered so different from other data?
The publishing industry (especially the section publishing music, films and TV) want to have other data treated more like software...
Hence the 'not for public broadcast, e.g. oil rigs, pubs etc' Wouldn't exactly say an oil rig was a public place!! -- Gary Stainburn This email does not contain private or confidential material as it may be snooped on by interested government parties for unknown and undisclosed purposes - Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act, 2000