Intellectual property Toolkit

Story: Anger over call to fine unlicensed software users

Posted by: Anonymous (Friday 1 September 2006, 12:07 PM)

There should be no ability to treat software license infringements as a 'serious issue' rather than purely a civil contract dispute until Software vendors lose the ability to write their own rules. Agreements, to have any meaning at all, need to be fair to both sides, most standard EULA's impose randon restrictons on usage policies, and excluse all liability for buggy and unreliable software - Lets face it if software performed as promised, most of would have stuck with Windows 95/ Office 97, and a few other packages released around the same time - Most companies upgrade merely because compatibilty gets broken when new versions are released and and companies don't want to fix it properly.
Again many companies have 'spare licenses' - Why shouldn't they be sold on?

Just because Software companies have the ability to impose unfair terms doesn't mean its right.

Once all these things are fixed we can be more judgemental about those who break the rules - at the moment there are many valid reasons to do so,