Nine Points of the Law
2006-08-17 21:11:45.401638+02 by petronius 0 comments
Do you own software you buy? This has been a prime question since the invention of shrinkwrap. Infoworld has a three part blog on the latest and strangest invocation of this problem. The LA Sherriffs Department bought ~3000 licenses to a terminal emulation program, then proceeded to ghost it down to 6000 PCs. Sounds like a violation, but the sherrif points out that only 3000 or so machines have the authority to access the mainframe the emulator is used on. Then the judge says the EULA supercedes federal copyright law, and that evidence to the contrary might be confusing to the jury! More to come on this one.