Is this piracy?

[Lorby_SI 2,038]

Double post? 

Edited October 21, 2019 by Lorby_SI

[Lorby_SI 2,038]

3 minutes ago, Ray Proudfoot said:

But in that example one party has lost money. In my scenario neither party has a financial gain. If the product was still available the person who wanted it would happily part with his cash.

Crime is independent of financial loss. You are not going to jail because anyone lost money. You are going because you broke the copyright laws.

"Draconian": you do realize that the same law applies to music, movies, literature? There is no difference. 5 years in jail for copying DVDs too.

Best regards 

[QuaxTheSnoopie 16]

If the company isn't a global player but a two persons thing and these persons understand that one would use their incredible software thing but they won't sell it anymore for liability and other legal or commercial reasons, may there be an option of a deal with the developper such as "I give you, dear developper, x$ as a gift and you give me a license key as a gift" ?

Or is there any opportunity to buy a license from someone that wiped the product of his disk ?
Do we need some kind of exchange forum for dropped licenses ?

Legal ways...
 

[Ray Proudfoot 8,942]

5 minutes ago, Lorby_SI said:

Crime is independent of financial loss. You are not going to jail because anyone lost money. You are going because you broke the copyright laws.

"Draconian": you do realize that the same law applies to music, movies, literature? There is no difference. 5 years in jail for copying DVDs too.

Best regards 

Making illegal copies of music, movies etc. is much harder now than before digital protection kicked in. But a law only has teeth if it’s enforceable. How many laws do we have that are unenforceable? You haven’t owned up to making tapes of a mate’s record collection. Maybe you’re too young! 😁

8 minutes ago, Lorby_SI said:

And if they want everybody to just take it, they will say so. Otherwise...

As a "maker of things" you have a certain attachment to your products. And yes, piracy hurts. People just taking my stuff hurts. Inside... I can't see why I have to protect everything by barbed wire just because otherwise everyone thinks that I don't care. I do.

Best regards

I can understand that. There are a lot of people with no morals whatsoever. I have never ‘stolen’ software and I appreciate your generosity in making Addon Organiser freely available. Same with RemoveAiSleepers. 👍

[mwa05 108]

This is an interesting conversation, and the end result also depends where you live.

I have an 82 year old uncle who has a lovingly cared for FSX installation on a dedicated computer. He can’t afford to “start again” and get a P3Dv4.5 HF2 installation anywhere near what he has now even though I have offered several times to pay for it all.

Now he lives one and a half hours by air from me, so I only get to see him 4 or 5 times a year but last time we were together he expressed regret that he never bought a particular MD-11 which is no longer for sale. He has the FSX version of a particular MD narrow body series (his only airliner) which he has beautifully mastered over the years and was interested in moving up to big brother of that family.

I have not had FSX since 64 bit P3D however I own a license to said MD-11, still have the .exe and the activation code (which I think I read somewhere is no longer needed) and I can still download it from my account.

Do I give it to my 82 year old uncle? He would be the (grateful) recipient of a gift, not a pirate...

So as I said, an interesting discussion and I believe consumer law in my country overrides the EULA (like Nuno Pinto above) and I too can do what I like with it provided I don’t sell it.

I could always buy Uncle Harry the B717 (when they patch the CTD) and avoid this!

[HighBypass 2,339]

11 minutes ago, QuaxTheSnoopie said:

...Or is there any opportunity to buy a license from someone that wiped the product of his disk ?...

This is what I was alluding to. However, if the developer of the product no longer supports it, nor has the database of registered users active to check who is flying what, then how could the license be charged for?

Devil's advocate: If the developer no longer cares enough about their product to maintain such systems then why bother about their IP? Back to abandonware? Or freeware?  Credit given and everyone's happy?

[GACSavannah 227]

4 hours ago, Ron Attwood said:

I would say yes, it is piracy however tenuous. How about this scenario. You have bought the product and need to reinstall it. You can download it but not install it because it needs to 'phone home'. But there is no longer 'a home' to phone. Would it be morally right to obtain a hooky copy?

 

Ron, if you own a license for the product, and the hooky version is the only one that you CAN install, I would be perfectly accepting of that.

[Ron Attwood 3,464]

1 hour ago, GACSavannah said:

Ron, if you own a license for the product, and the hooky version is the only one that you CAN install, I would be perfectly accepting of that.

I did and I didn't/don't feel bad about it. I'm still owed one more aircraft but no response and I've not been able to find a 'hooky' one. I guess I'll have to swallow it.

[Murmur 3,941]

8 hours ago, Ray Proudfoot said:

Imagine this scenario. A popular 3rd party aircraft is withdrawn from sale for reasons not altogether clear. A user would like to acquire it but cannot purchase it. Is it morally or legally acceptable for someone who has purchased it to pass on the installer and registration details?

For me it would be absolutely morally acceptable, provided that the original owner doesn't keep a copy.

If the company is still active, I would also consider morally acceptable that the new owner would buy another product of equivalent price without never installing it.

[tjstreak 53]

Well, I am a lawyer, but I don't do intellectual property law.

Questions like this are more complex than one might think.  At the outset, there is a question as to what law applies.  While the laws of some countries are similar, some countries have very different laws.  For example, copyright laws tend to be very lax to non-existent in India.  Also, communist countries do not tend to have copyright laws because Marxist ideology does not recognize private property.

Then there are doctrines like fair use.  Copying a program for a friend probably would not be fair use.

If a EULA is involved, then all of the issues involved in contract formation and interpretation is involved.  Obviously, if you received the item, you were not a part of the EULA.

Then there is the question of who made the copy.  Did your friend make the copy, or did you.

And how does the copyright holder even find out, let alone prove that the illegal copy was made.  It's not as easy as you might think -- unless somehow they can get access to and inspect your computer.

I have not even gotten into the issue of orphan software.  That is, the original copyright holder has gone out of business and no one seems to know who actually owns the copyright.

And on and on.

What all that means is this type of litigation is real expensive.  (Just ask Austin Meyer).  Does the copyright holder want to spend $100,000 to $1,000,000 in attorneys fees just to get a judgment which will be discharged in bankruptcy?  Litigation is not practical in the vast majority of cases.

I think the real question is the moral question.  As is the case with 99% of laws, compliance is largely voluntary.  People tend to follow laws they believe are just, and disregard those which are unjust.  As I stated, litigation is seldom feasible from an business standpoint.

I tend to think copyright law has become entirely out of control.  It has largely been taken over by large corporate interests (think Disney) to extract monopoly rents.  Consider, the purpose of copyright laws is to encourage artists, authors, inventors to create new works.  It really was never intended to be a profit center.  It was never intended to exist in perpetuity.

The term intellectual property is misleading because what we are talking about really is not "property," at least in the sense which we usually talk about "property."

Also, with so much of modern media, the marginal cost of creating another copy is approaching zero.  So there is a real question of how much a copyright holder should be able to charge for something which may not really cost him anything.

After all, the whole purpose of copyright law is to give someone a monopoly.  Monopolies are entirely contrary to free-market ideology.  You can believe in copyrights or you can believe in free markets, but you cannot believe in both.

As a moral question, it is largely up to one's personal sense of values.  For me, I would not have trouble sleeping at night if a friend gave me a copy of a piece of software which was no longer available commercially.  For me, it is comparable to going to a library, checking out an out of print book, taking it home and copying or scanning it.

 

[Lorby_SI 2,038]

5 hours ago, HighBypass said:

Devil's advocate: If the developer no longer cares enough about their product to maintain such systems then why bother about their IP? Back to abandonware? Or freeware?  Credit given and everyone's happy?

See my example above. In Germany, stealing garbage from a dumpster is still theft, punishable by law (which they did).

Even freeware and open source have IP rules governing them, you can't just do whatever you want with that either.

Best regards

Edited October 22, 2019 by Lorby_SI

[Lorby_SI 2,038]

3 hours ago, tjstreak said:

As is the case with 99% of laws, compliance is largely voluntary.  People tend to follow laws they believe are just, and disregard those which are unjust.  As I stated, litigation is seldom feasible from an business standpoint.

Quoting a piece from the Belgian Chamber of Commerce website on the Frontier Economy report from 2017:

Quote

Titled, The Economic Impacts of Counterfeiting and Piracy, the report provides estimates on the wider social and economic impacts on displaced economic activity, investment, public fiscal losses and criminal enforcement, and concludes that these costs could reach an estimated US$1.9 trillion by 2022. Taken together, the negative impacts of counterfeiting and piracy are projected to drain US$4.2 trillion from the global economy and put 5.4 million legitimate jobs at risk by 2022

It doesn't really matter if those jobs are lost at Disney's or in a garage somewhere.

I can tell you about encouragement. Imagine how it feels when you realize that your payware products are available on various pirate sites, and that the total number of downloads from those sites exceeds your own sales by from double to an order of magnitude. I am questioning my decision to make FS addons every single day, and every single day my finger hovers over the button to send those emails to the shops to terminate sales for good. 

Intellectual property laws exist to make sure that the original creator isn't kicked out of the loop should a third party decide to make a ton of money with his product - and that he has a chance of being compensated for his efforts, should he decide to want that. It doesn't matter if he himself has any financial loss - it is his stuff, and he is the only person who has any right to decide what is to be done with it, how it shall be used and by whom. If "free market" means, that this simple truth of life is obliterated, there won't be any programmers left who would want to contribute anything to it. Making a copy does not cost anything. But creating the product does, and it costs a lot.

Best regards

Edited October 22, 2019 by Lorby_SI

[Lorby_SI 2,038]

8 hours ago, Ray Proudfoot said:

You haven’t owned up to making tapes of a mate’s record collection. Maybe you’re too young! 

I was proud owner of a brand new Sinclair ZX81 right when it came out. "The first home computer for under 500 DM".

Best regards

[pete_auau 1,157]

14 hours ago, Ray Proudfoot said:

Imagine this scenario. A popular 3rd party aircraft is withdrawn from sale for reasons not altogether clear. A user would like to acquire it but cannot purchase it. Is it morally or legally acceptable for someone who has purchased it to pass on the installer and registration details?

Of course it might not be possible for it to be successfully installed but that would only be known during the process.

Piracy is defined as stealing a product thereby denying the seller the money they would otherwise have earned. But as the product is no longer for sale is that relevant?

I can’t decide. What do you think?

thought  the  question  you asked  at the  relevant addon  you  had  asked  on their  forum,  was  already answered, posting  it  in here  is not  going  to change  the  outcome.

[FDEdev 955]

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