pn (04/17/83)
The Feb. issue of IEEE Micro had an interesting column on "Present copyright law - little protection against unlicensed use of proprietary compilers." The conclusion was: "Software licenses that require a second party (an OEM) to collect a royalty for a proprietor from a third party (the OEM's customer) are probably legal. However, if an OEM has obtained an unlicensed copy of a proprietor's compiler, the copyright law probably provides no effective relief for the proprietor except in the case of archival or other copying by the OEM. Under the present copyright law, the proprietor cannot compel the OEM to pay a royalty for each use of the pirated compiler, because loading a copyrighted program into a computer is not an act of copyright infringement. Nor can the proprietor compel the OEM's customer to pay a royalty for each use of a program produced with the pirated compiler, because under present law proprietary rights in software do not exist against third parties. Whether a software law should apply to the use of pirated compilers is an interesting and difficult question..." What do the readers of this network think? What is the position of companies like Microsoft, if any? And is it time for net.law? (I assume the column ignored software serialization.)