Duncan Neithercut wrote: > In English law much depends on intent : In Germany most licenses are usually not worth the electrons they're stored with. There are several issues, but the main one is that the sales contract is agreed upon the time of sale, all licenses you get to see after you have bought a product are effectively nil because they were not part of the sales contract. Software vendors try to circumvent this by letting the user agree to the license before you can actually use the product. The legal binding of this, too, is doubtful, at least for private users, as it restricts them too much without giving them any gain. But I'm not aware of cases where this has actually been tested in court.
Usually software is bought (and not rented, which are really the only 2 options there are), and therefore can be used like all other things that can be bought, for example a book: You can cross words out, write new words in, even tell other people "hey, if you cross out that word and write this instead, the book is much cooler". What you cannot do is violate copyright law, i.e. make a copy of the book, with or without your changes. There is even a law that states that you are allowed to reverse engineer something in order to make it inter-operate with other products (this includes reverse-engineering of protocols and file formats). This is even part of the EU software directive from 1991. In summary, while almost all software products nowadays come with a ton of legalese to read, at least in Germany vendors would have a very hard time to actually enforce it. Of course the unelected shadow government in Brussels (oh, don't get me started!) nowadays has two ears for the industry and none for the people, therefore all this might change in the future. Marcel _______________________________________________ QL-Users Mailing List http://www.q-v-d.demon.co.uk/smsqe.htm
