They were using it for advertising. Or publishing it without permission. Those are far different from personal use.
I have photos on my website, they are copyrighted (actually the whole site is).
If you copy one and hang it on your living room wall that does not hurt me in
anyway (actually it would make me feel kind of proud), but if you use it in a
advertisement, or sell copies, where I would normally expect to make money from
the use you are then hurting me, actually taking money, or at least potential
money, out of my pocket.
Licensing agreements: if you read and sign (or click) before you obtain the
product then you are bound by them, IF they are legal. Note, that is a big IF.
If they have something illegal in them, and most of them do, then they are null
and void anyway. Legal types try to get around that by stating that any illegal
clause is null and void but the rest remains in effect. AFAIK no state in the
US, nor the US itself will recognize that. Any contract with illegal clauses is
totally null and void. What those licensing agreements are is FUD generators.
Their purpose is to scare the signer into doing what the software company
wants, not to provide for legal redress. Any contract which says it is binding
upon the buyer, but the seller does not actually provide anything that will do
anything is illegal. Contracts have to bind both parties to be legal, at least
under US, and English based common law.
Ethics should be debated. They are personal rules, and without debate are
usually so undefined as to be nonexistent. Legality as made plain above is a
two way street. And morals are a matter between you and your religious beliefs.
One is only a hypocrite if one violates the rules one professes.
I personally consider myself a very ethical person. I will not willingly do
anything that I think will harm someone else, unless they have deliberately
tried to harm me first (enlightened self-defense). I tend to lean towards
anarchism, so externally imposed rules are less important to me than the
internal ones.
I think that no one is actually advocating software theft in this thread, but
rather we are discussing the philosophical aspects of the matter. It is not so
black and white an issue as many imagine.
graywolf
http://www.graywolfphoto.com
"Idiot Proof" <==> "Expert Proof"
-----------------------------------
William Robb wrote:
I find it odd that a group of photographers are debating the ethics of
intellectual property rights.
Any one of us would be totally pissfaced if someone lifted one of our
photos to use without paying (remember the eBay links to Boz's site, or
the deep link problem we had at the PUG a few years back).
Both situations were people not paying for something they were using
without permission, and not something they would have bought anyway.
Me thinks there are a few hypocrites out there.
William Robb
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