On Fri, 2005-12-09 at 07:12 -0600, Randomthots wrote: > It's frustrating and often sad and > tragic, but it's not the mafia. And it's not illegal or criminal.
A school here rang me to say they had had a visit by FAST. UK version of BSA. They were threatened with death if they had any pirate software and then offered some software for £5000 to check and audit their servers. That sounds to me very like extortion. At least demanding money with menaces. Still probably difficult to prove in a court of law so morally questionable rather than illegal. > We really need to reserve some, if not most or all, or our > disapprobation for the politicians which aid and abet this nonsense. We are all politicians as soon as we are part of a marketing project that advocates a product. > Some things that Microsoft has done *are* illegal, but it's kind of a > fuzzy situation in that these same actions wouldn't be illegal if they > had less market share. If my aunty had balls she'd be my uncle. If the law is to be respected, its not a matter of being fuzzy. Its either breaking the law or it isn't as determined by a court. If you want to be fuzzy, then the FAST example above could be just as easily argued to be the mafia on the same basis. > So phrases like "convicted monopolist"... I'm not > even sure what the hell that means. It means that a court of law found them guilty of breaking the laws related to abuse of monopoly. I'd have though that was pretty easy to understand. Abuse is defined by the legislation pretty clearly. For companies with large legal departments, its inconceivable that they do not know what they are doing. They are playing calculated risks hoping the benefit outweighs the downside and to hell with everyone else. The only real fault with the law from a technical point of view is that the penalties are often not severe enough to deter the law breaking. > It's a strange situation when something that's legal for me to do today > is illegal tomorrow Having sex with a girl one day below the minimum age of consent is illegal to-day but not tomorrow. This type of thing happens in the law all the time because lines have to be drawn somewhere. > In the U.S. we highly value a free, competitive, market-place. But unfortunately you have one that is increasingly bound up in litigation. I believe the US has more lawyers per capita than anywhere else in the world. Still if the society is a democracy and the law is based on that democracy its a bit facile to then say that the law is fuzzy so it OK to break it. It can just as easily be argued that a market dominated by a monopoly is anything but free. > Is it any wonder the lawyers make piles of money? Evidently not in the USA. -- Ian Lynch <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> ZMS Ltd --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] For additional commands, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
