Amiga osX

[mdwh2]

My understanding of copyrights is that they are to do with who has a *right* to *copy* - in particular, to do with distribution of a work. This is nothing to do with asking what someone may do with software that they have legally obtained.

So even if breaking an EULA is illegal (which is dubious for various reasons - such as the fact that clicking a button can't be necessarily taken as meaning a user knowingly agreed to a contract, or the fact that these contracts are forced upon the user after they've paid for the product), at best it is breaking a contract, and *not* copyright infringement, piracy, or whatever else you want to call it. It would only be that if they gave copies to someone else.

In what countries/states has an EULA been legally upheld? Perhaps there are some, but I don't believe they are in the majority.

GAG wrote:
A company can make up any licence for thier software.  If it says that you have to a certain age, nationality, or run it one certain software then they are quite entitled to.  It doesn't matter how immoral or wrong it is but if you use thier software and you break thier EULA then you can be considered as a pirate.  I know it's wrong but it is thier product and they can distribute it however they want to.

At the end of the day you 'do not own' the software, you only have a licence to use it.  If you breach that agreement (End User Licence Agreement) then they are quite within thier rights to remove or make the product unusable.

A company may be able to refuse to sell software to someone for whatever reasons it likes, but it's another matter to prevent them using it *after they have bought the product*, and when they were not informed of such conditions and restrictions when the contract of purchase was made.

The common assumption with every day products like the ones from M$ is that if you have the disk and you paid for it then it's yours to do whatever you like with it.  Once you tell people that they cannot copy the software or duplicate you always end up with the same old argument.

Yes, it's not yours to do what you like with - for example you can't give copies to other people. That's copyright law which exists in many countries under the Berne Convention. But at the same time, that doesn't mean that companies have a right to do what they like, nor does it mean that you aren't allowed to do things just because some company tells you, because you use a product of theirs that you legally obtained.

Making software which is hardware dependant could cause serious legal problems when you pay for software and it doesn't work due to a mechanical problem when the description on the box clearly says it works!

I think it's also a serious legal problem if I'm supposedly a pirate for using software I've paid for legally, in a manner perfectly consistent with the description of the software on the box.

[mdwh2]

MarkTime wrote:
Your country sweden is not the WHOLE WORLD.
This is what many people have been trying to drill into this discussion.

Sweden was an example of a country where EULAs are definately not enforceable. However, we've yet to have an example of a country (or even an individual state) where an EULA has been upheld in court.. how many are there?

There are many countries in the world, and in the vast majority of Europe and America, the idea that you can buy a service, license a product, is central to IP ownership.  You do not BUY OS X.  You buy a limited license to use OS X under certain restrictions.

Yes, but those restrictions are defined by copyright law; they are not defined by what extra conditions a company decides to spring on you, after the contract of purchase has already been completed.

It's all very well saying that the EULA is a legal licence, but you're forgetting that before that happens, the user has paid money in exchange for the right to use the software (as described by the laws of their country). So unless the terms of the EULA are presented at the time of purchase, they mean nothing - if the user refuses to accept the EULA, then big deal - they still have a right to use the software, and do anything that can be considered "fair use".

The way that the argument is supposed to go, as far as I can see, is that because the user clicked "I accept", then that means they *did* accept the contract. However this seems dubious to me, mainly because the user is forced to do this in order to use the product that they have a legal right to use, but also because clicking a button in a computer program isn't generally recognised as a means of necessarily agreeing with a contract (if I walk around with a sticker on my forehead which says "if you shake my hand, you must pay me £1000", if I managed to get someone to unwittingly do that, I'd be surprised if that would hold up in court). And also, this means that if the user gets round this (ie, installing without clicking okay somehow, whether it's done by installing manually, or hacking it somehow), then there would be no way they could have been said to have agreed with the EULA.

Getting more on-topic, the licence agreement for AmigaOS 3.9 says "This License allows you to install and use the Amiga Software on a single Amiga-labeled or Amiga-licensed computer at a time", which could be taken to mean that you aren't allowed to run it on an emulator. Though in this case you don't even have to click "I accept" to it; I just don't accept what this says, and stick with what the law allows me to do (or perhaps I could instead get round it by sticking an Amiga label on my PC;)

Remember that Sony were unable to prevent people from selling Playstation emulators - though I'm unable to find out whether Playstation games typically have a "you can only play this on a real Playstation" type EULA.. anyone know more about this case?

[mdwh2]

GAG wrote:
This EULA is agreed to by the user who purchases it BEFORE installation.
In this EULA I say something like "It can only be used on an Amiga (hardware)", is this wrong?  If I said something like "you must be over 30 years old", is that wrong?  O.k. it's age descrimanation and some countries probably have laws against that, but you don't have to agree!

It all comes down to what the user agrees before installation.  You DON'T have to agree but doing so means you cannot use the software.

Well this is exactly the question - are we talking about an EULA that takes place at the time of purchase, or one that happens during installation? IMO there is a fundamental difference.

I would say that in the latter case, you don't have agree, but nonetheless you can still use the software. In the former case, the company can refuse to sell the software to whoever for whatever reason, and force customers to sign legal contracts before purchase. But we don't have to do this for any other kind of product; I'd find it scary if this became commonplace for software.

By selling the software the customer/user may own the physical disk (by law) but they do not own the software or the right to do as they please with it.  There is something called 'Intellectual property' whereas the software is not owned by the person who has the disk...

What can and can't be done is covered by copyright law. Which says nothing about letting companies have total control in saying what you can and can't do with the software.

they simply just 'rent' the software (so to speak).

Except the majority of software (including MacOS X, and AmigaOS 3.9) isn't rented.

At the end of the day, if I said that in order to use my software you have to comply with MY rules, no matter how immoral they may be, then I can inforce that because the software is mine (intellectual property).  If you continue to use the software and by doing so have agreed to my rules, should you break these rules then you have broken an agreement (or contract) and you can, quite rightly, be classed as a pirate!

If you give the rules upfront, then perhaps. But you can't change the rules after you've already accepted money from your customers. And a pirate is someone who copies without permission; not someone who doesn't accept the contract that you try to impose after purchase.

The world of computing has turned from 'Personal Computing' to simply using terminals on the internet.  The end user owns nothing but the physical product.  :-(

Erm, except it hasn't. I don't know about you, but the software I run is running locally on my machine, and not on some remote server.

[mdwh2]

If you want to do that, why not just buy a Mac in the first place - more powerful, less expensive (in many cases), nicer designs, more software, and certainly more up-to-date than comparable AmigaOne motherboards/systems.

Because maybe people want to run Amiga software and other platforms, without having to buy two machines? Admittedly yes, at the moment you can't run anything Amiga related on the AmigaOne, but it's still a relevant question either for the Pegasos, or for when OS4 is finally released. Emulation of other systems on Amiga hardware has always been on topic for Amiga forums.