Hadden@HI-MULTICS.ARPA (06/28/84)
I had an upsetting experience the other night: I attended a local
Commodore users' group meeting ("local" is Minneapolis/St Paul) where a
room was set up with vendors who deal in Commodore related products.
One of the vendors -- Q-Soft (alias QR&D) -- sells a product called
"Copy-Q" which backs up copy-protected floppies.
It turns out that Q-Soft is suing a high school kid for (get this)
managing to bypass their protection scheme and copy their Copy-Q program
in such a way that the new disk was not copy-protected. I was told by
the kid that the amount of the suit was $100,000. I was also told by
the kid that Q-Soft employees challenged him to break the scheme.
Now, understand that this kid paid for the program and did not try to
sell it or redistribute it in any way. When I pointed out to one of the
Q-Soft people (whom I believe to be an owner) that one has a right to
back up one's own disks, this same fellow said that, sure, anyone can
copy software but if s/he changes it during the copying process in any
way, then the copyright laws have been violated. I think this is a
crock.
What do YOU think? Please post replies to info-micro or send them to me
(Hadden@HI-MULTICS). Thanks for your time.
-geo
P.S. For the record, Q-Soft in many other respects is a pretty good
company: they charge $30.00 for Copy-Q (yes, I have one; no, I don't
pirate -- I came within a hair's breadth of losing a non-backed up RM05
once, so I'll go to great lengths to backup my software) which I think
is pretty cheap; Copy-Q won't back itself up, however release n+1 is
guaranteed to backup release n; they offer discounts to owners of
previous releases; and the program works very well.jpm@BNL.ARPA (06/29/84)
The company is out of its mind and the high school student should countersue claiming malicious prosecution. Unless the person signed a license agreement that stated he wouldn't modify the code then the copyright laws give him to right to do whatever he wants to with his copy.
"PearsonPete"@LLL-MFE.ARPA (06/29/84)
Three cheers for the kid!