At 12:15 AM 7/03/03 -0500, Gregory S. DeLozier wrote:
>Hi, I wrote
>> >> or create a program to modify iDVD for others.
>> >
>> >Why not?
>
>Alan responded...
>
>> ...Apple licensed the MPEG2
>> software in iDVD on the basis it was bundled with their burner...
>
>OK, so I imagine their license says something like "only licensed for use
>with ..."
>Fine.
>> However, the end users didn't sign any such licensing agreement.
>Well, perhaps by extension (i.e. acceptance of the software licenses)
>they did.
"By extension" is not "signing". Shrinkwrap licenses ("by opening this
package you agree to ... 10 pages of small print...) are used to
intimidate, but have rarely been tested in court. A contract, to be valid,
must be shown to have been deliberately and knowingly entered into by both
parties.
>I'd like to know, if I distributed a program that changed bytes in someone
>else's copy of iDVD, exactly what Apple would accuse me of doing? It
>may well be that the someone else would be violating a (dubious) license
>agreement, but the provider of the patch code isn't distributing iDVD in
>any way.
I don't know, as far as I know, they've only leaned on one of their
distributors who was doing something like that, and course they folded, as
they depend on Apple.
>OK, you've just performed a Disney property. And if they owned it when
>you spoke it, do they own it when it's in your head. You know songs you
>"can't get out of your head because they play over and over..." Do you
>have permission to do that?
Copyright of music is involved with publishing or performing, thinking, for
the moment, is still not an infringement. Just don't hum it.
>So again I ask: on what basis would one consider it to be a copyright
>violation to distribute software that modifies legally owned software?
>
>I'm not just asking this to be peevish; I write software for a living, and
>sometimes I do have to write code that works with vendor code in
>ways that aren't forseeable. Around here we push our computers to
>the edge, and we don't always do it in vendor-suggested ways.
>When people start thinking that's illegal somehow, and when
>(relatively) influential writers like Dan Knight start acting like
>it is, that worries me somehow.
>
Don't take this as authoritative, but I believe that reverse-engineering,
for the purposes of interoperability, is a defence.
After all, all the big companies do or did this --MS Office has filters for
WordPerfect and Lotus files, as when it was introduced they were the market
leaders. Apple had/has a bunch of filters and software to deal with DOS
disks and the like.
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