Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!husc6!bloom-beacon!athena.mit.edu!tada
From: tada@athena.mit.edu (Michael Zehr)
Newsgroups: comp.misc
Subject: Re: Piracy
Keywords: copy protection piracy
Message-ID: <5585@bloom-beacon.MIT.EDU>
Date: 31 May 88 20:39:01 GMT
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In article <501@novavax.UUCP> maddoxt@novavax.UUCP (Thomas Maddox) writes:
>
>	I have been following this discussion of piracy with special
>interest because, unlike the majority of discussants, I am not a
>programmer, but [...] a writer.
>
>[isn't bothered by someone photo-copying an article of his]
>
>	If I were a programmer, however, I suspect I would feel
>differently--*perhaps* because the money to be made programming is on
>the whole (or on the average) much more than the money to be made
>writing fiction.  In short, by xeroxing my _Omni_ story, you really
>don't steal much from me.  However, if I write a useful MSDOS utility,
>and you steal that, then you may be stealing quite a bit more.  
> [other good points about intellectual property]

Yes, but...  How would you feel if someone photo-copied a book of yours
instead of just an article?  What if photo-copying the book took only a
few seconds of time.  It's impractical to photo-copy an entire book.  But
if it weren't ...

It is true that there is more money to be made in software than in writing
fiction.  But partly that's because there are programming teams, whereas
writing is generally individual.

If I write something small, then usually I don't bother marketing it at all
but just spread it around for free.  Assuming royalties are such that you
can't live on just one published article a month, that article took you
less than a man-month to produce, right?  [I don't know what typical 
royalties are, so i could be way off base here.]  To continue your 
comparison of magnitude of crimes, copying a single article is closer
to petty theft, but copying an entire book is more like grand theft.

There's also a tricky clause in the copyright laws.  Something about personal
copies for educational purposes.  I'm not a lawyer, so i don't know the exact
phrasing or application, but my understanding is that if i see an article in 
a computer journal which i think everyone in my department should read, i'm
allowed to make 10 copies and stick it in everyone's mailbox.  It's for
"personal" (as a corporation is a person under the law) educational 
purposes.  But how does that apply to software?

There's also a difference in kinds of piracy.  If I copy 1-2-3 and put
it on 10 machines in an office, but only _one_ of them is actually
running the program at any one time, is that illegal?  (Note i'm
asking if it's "illegal", not if it's "immoral" or "wrong.")  In other
words, there's a difference between "copy-piracy" and "copy-and-sell-
piracy."

There are a lot of new ideas in software licensing, too.  Particularly in
having different prices depending on the platform you want to run the
software on.  In cases like this, the licensing party is charging you for
the usefullness of the product, notwithstanding that the program is
identical.  (For those of you not familiar with software licensing, i'm
referring to the practice of charging more for a particular program based
on the MIPS [or perceived MIPS :-) ] of the machine it will run on.) 

Anyway, it's a very complicated issue, and I certainly don't think I
have all the answers...

-michael j zehr