From: potts@oit.itd.umich.edu (Paul Potts)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.mac.programmer
Subject: Re: Why the Piracy? Here's why...
Date: 7 Jan 1993 19:14:14 GMT
Organization: Instructional Technology Laboratory, University of Michigan
NNTP-Posting-Host: helen.oit.itd.umich.edu

>> There's nothing complicated about it. It is fully susceptible to a simple
>> answer.

I was going to leave this thread alone, but it is time to jump in...

I think you will find that a lot of what is technically piracy (using
software in violation of the license agreement), especially in otherwise
conscientious offices or organizations, is really inadvertent, essentially
caused by well-meaning people trying to do the best they can but getting
snagged by baroque, bizarre, and draconian licensing agreements.
In general, most licensing agreements have not caught up with the concepts
of fully distributed networking and telecommuting.

My office is a case in point. All of our software is stored on a central
AppleShare server, but for efficiency's sake copies are made to local hard
disks. (This already violates some licensing agreements). Take Photoshop for
example: a massively great program, massively useful, and mondo expensive
(I'm not saying it isn't worth every penny, but it is very expensive). My
office owns two copies. A while ago we somehow wound up entering the serial
numbers for one of them into both copies when installing on our server, and
then due to the built-in network serial-number checking, we could only run
one of our copies at once. We didn't find this out, of course, until partway
through a class with a number of University VIPs present. What is the ethical
thing to do in a case like this? Or, if two people in our office leave
Photoshop running on their machines overnight, when I'm hear late suddenly
I try to edit a picture and find that I can't do it. What to do then?
(When things go right and everyone remembers to quit their application, two
copies always seems to be enough for our office). What about if everyone
has copied Photoshop to their local hard disks, and I run it over Appletalk
Remote from home? 

In all the environments I've worked in, people do generally really want to
comply with licensing agreements and purchase sufficient copies to cover
themselves, ethically and legally. But take a look at some licensing
agreements and see if you really comply with them. As an example: we really
do own four or five copies of THINK C, with manuals and disks, one for
everyone who might conceivably want to use it. But for very expensive
packages, we have to try simply to have sufficient copies for the number
of people that  might be attempting to use it simultaneously. And there are
other strange requirements in licensing agreements that I can't bring myself
to comply with: I have a personal copy of Supercard, upgraded to version 1.5.
The Aldus licensing agreement says that I have to physically destroy the
disks from the older version. Would you do this? What if you come across a
disk with an old Supercard app you wrote that requires 1.0?

My point is that software vendors have to make their licensing arrangments
understandable, reasonable, and achievable if they want them to be
understood and achieved. Schemes that require master disks or count
installations are simply a huge pain in a distributed, networked office
where people have computers at home, at work, and on planes, and where
the software we run on a typical machine could cost as much as the machine
itself. The serial-number checking over the network isn't two difficult to
cope with, but it can cause pain at times. I loathe copy protection
schemes - when I was a high-school hacker I used to eat copy-protection
schemes for lunch. My first reaction when I hear from a vendor that uses
some kind of a token system, or dongles, or a master disk system, or a
count-of-installations system, is "no thanks, we'll look at another
company's software." I'll never forget the time I was working to install
a DNA-sequencing program with an installation-counting installer, and
the install program bombed during two installation attempts, after
having marked the software as installed, but before finishing the install
and making the application usable. Gag.   

I think that if you scratch most business users you'll find someone who 
really does want to be doing the right thing when it comes to software, but
it just isn't always that easy, or even clear what the right thing is.

-- 
Politics is crime pursued by other means.              
potts@oit.itd.umich.edu      CI$ 71561,3362 (rarely)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.mac.programmer,comp.os.ms-windows.programmer.tools,comp.windows.ms.programmer