At 01:33 AM 3/9/05 -0600, Noel Stoutenburg wrote: >I am aware of the language used on the Finale site, but it doesn't >change the fact that you are not acquiring any ownership rights in the >software, but agreeing to acquire a non-exclusive permission to use the >property of MakeMusic! under the terms of limits and restrictions that >are an inherent part of the license you agree to when you acquire the >software. Further, it gets a bit more complicated in that you do own >the disk and jewel box it came in (in my case, since I got 2k5 as an >upgrade), and any documentation, but not the software itself.
Noel, you're conflating two issues. Your argument is about language and law. Whenever anyone buys a physical manifestation of 'intellectual property', they purchase a certain body of rights, implicit and explicit. That's IP101. And that's not the issue. The issue is commerce and trade and, in this case, the customer's victimization -- irrespective of the language and law used to promulgate and disguise offensive tethering practices. Language and law never relieve a company of ethical responsibility to the customer, and ultimately companies who are unethical pay the price in bankruptcy. Victimware is what you get when you buy tethered software, and no matter how you spin the language or law, you and *your* intellectual property become beholden to the corporate owners for the *rest of their life* (not yours!) in a permanent digital serfdom. After that, your proverbial property pooch is screwed. If ending victimware production means Coda/MM has to negotiate better terms -- or that the industry as a whole has to negotiate their way out of the rights nightmare that *they themselves* have created due to laziness and greed -- then they need to make that happen. They have not earned my sympathy. Somehow other companies (and I list some of them in my article) have managed to do what you claim is so difficult. It's about will, about ethics, about a customer-centrism that has absented itself from much corporate mentality, including Coda/MM's. I have made a serious, fully functional proposal on how to solve the victimware issue in a way that is independent of a corporation's vagaries and that is within both contract and IP law and practice. Do you have a serious, fully functional proposal that doesn't make you the ultimate victim (when Coda/MM goes under, changes their terms, or ceases to support your software)? (Just ask Graphire owners about that last one.) Keep in mind that a contract may not be used to vacate guaranteed rights, and less offensive practices have been subject to government regulation. Regulation is the unwelcome last step, of course, but corporate recalcitrance may require the language-and-law solution. Just consider Coda/MM and its ilk to be corporate intellectual property polluters. Polluters rarely clean up of their own accord, and tethered customers will be the software industry's Love Canal. Dennis _______________________________________________ Finale mailing list [email protected] http://lists.shsu.edu/mailman/listinfo/finale
