Companies of all sizes rushed into the digital space because it was where the future, customers, and money were. But offering software, music, books, movies, and anything else as a digital download to a person who actually purchased it is and should be no different than when the customer bought a pack of floppy disks for install, a vinyl record or CD, a hardback or paperback, or a VHS or DVD. I posses as much right to re-sell or give away anything I purchased in digital form as I do to re-sell or give away my CDs, cars, home, motorcycle, or whatever else.
As stated by many of the people defending piracy on HN, software isn't a tangible item. So why should it be treated like a pack of floppies or a paperback book?
You aren't buying software outright. If you were, it would cost $100,000 rather than $100. You are purchasing a license to use it, which means you can use it once (and sell it if you want to one person). However, you aren't allowed to copy it to your friends.
"Copyright and "licensing" are out of control. If I'm only renting software, then charge me the price of renting it and stop saying I purchased it. And, like other rentals, take on the responsibility of fixing problems I have with using the software, much the way a landlord or Enterprise Rent-a-Car takes on responsibility for your rental."
Would you also be willing to pay a monthly fee for software that you download? Why should a company fix your problems forever when you only paid them a one-time fee?
1) Companies who sell physical goods generally offer a limited-time warranty, not forever. Software can do likewise. They can also specify what they don't cover - ie "if you install this on an OS other than what we listed, or use peripherals that come out in the future which we couldn't have anticipated, and something doesn't work, you'll have to pay for support or updates to get our help." 2) I wouldn't expect a company to spend more supporting their software than they make by selling it. But a company SHOULD help their customers get their software working because it's good customer support, and because "fixing my problems" may well mean improving their software. If they're unwilling to put forth reasonable effort, I'm happy to use their competitor's product.
However, I suspect a EULA can gain some teeth by granting you new rights aka downloadable content etc.
PS: If you had free time and money you could probably buy software and sue to get it to work without signing a EULA. Now I would avoid doing this with Microsoft, but a smaller software shop is probably the right place to create a little precedence.
Come to think of it, houses and cars are much better for analogy. Nobody ever confuses renting a home with purchasing a home. Completely different expectations and end results. Same goes for cars. Now, you are within your rights to be both dumbfounded and irate if you are told years later by the builder of the house (or car manufacturer) that you cannot sell your home or your car to another party because they have not given express permission for you to transfer ownership.
You aren't renting it. You are paying for a license. Renting implies that you are paying the company a monthly fee to use it, which rarely happens with packaged software (unless you are buying support or paying for some sort of service). You get one license to use it. You just can't share it with all of your friends for free or start selling multiple copies of it (which is understandable).
"Now, you are within your rights to be both dumbfounded and irate if you are told years later by the builder of the house (or car manufacturer) that you cannot sell your home or your car to another party because they have not given express permission for you to transfer ownership."
Since so many people like you are bitching about how buying software isn't actually "buying", it leads me to believe that most people already know this. If this wasn't the case, I think we would see more lawsuits in the US.
But I do not see anything wrong in a vendor requiring the hardware to be in a specific way to use a hosted service such as App Store, Kindle downloads or Xbox Live.
Honest question. I can only think of adding such user-friendly provisions in a EULA, but wouldn't that still be licensing?
http://www.osnews.com/story/22342/Borland_in_the_1980s_quot_...
To be fair, a court could probably also order the police to come to your house and confiscate your paper books. In that sense, you really don't own anything - ownership is a product of governments. (Or rather, a product of guns).
Having said that, I advocate that there is a overarching source of ownership rights, whether they are called moral rights or natural rights or whatever. For example, I think a person owns his own body and regardless of what the law says, the government can't visit your house and take one of your kidneys because someone else wants yours. Other people think that they should be able to, for the "good" of society.
Of course, as a Christian, I believe we're endowed by our Creator with certain unalienable rights...
The truth of the matter is that copyright law assumed a certain level of difficulty involved in the act of copying another work. To copy a book requires either theft from a publisher or pouring through it, page by page, and manually recreating it. The same is true of old VHS tapes. Some apparatus, not widely available, was required to make copies that could be redistributed. Since real effort was required to produce copies, copyright law could rightfully condemn those who would make copies.
The ubiquity of digital technology has fundamentally changed this. Copying anything is trivial yet copyright law has been left unchanged. These laws are simply inadequate for our modern reality.
An overhaul of the whole system by some smart, competent, and knowledgeable people is necessary. Unfortunately, big media has such stake in the antiquated laws, and such influence in the legislature (in the US, but very likely abroad as well), that such a change probably won't happen for a number of years. So, until then, we are stuck in this lawless landscape where everyone on every side of the argument is wrong.
I think you have it upside-down. Before the printing press, there were no copyrights. It was an honor for the author if someone took the time to copy his book.
Nowadays, when you buy a book or a CD, you're paying for content, not for the medium. In that context, maybe "stealing" is not an appropriate word, but "free-loading" definitely is.
Even so, copying is trivial and available to everyone. It is not feasible to have the granular control necessary to prevent widespread copying and this is exactly the situation with which we are faced. I argue that the current laws are inadequate for dealing with the situation and, in fact, I think this is self-apparent.
Your argument seems to be that what we are buying is somehow different from what we used to buy. You also seem to have downgraded the act of copying from theft to some lesser repugnant act. Both of these would suggest that we need something different from the current copyright system.
You can disagree with my initial synopsis of copyright laws, and your point of contention there is likely valid, but my message wasn't that copyright laws were only useful when it was difficult to copy works, but that the laws, as they exist now, do not fit in a world where content is so liquid and decentralized.
By no means am I arguing that, because of this, creators should not have their works protected, but rather that a paradigm shift is necessary to actually reach that end.
In other words, they wanted to be both a software owner (so that they could sell the original software) and a licensee (so that they could get upgrade discounts). This seems to me like an abuse of the system... although I'm not sure I like the way the court has resolved it, either.
As Larry Lessig points out, common sense is a rare idea in the practice of law.
