That wasn't my point in this particular answer.
it's point was to show, that the vendor *thinks* that continued
use of his software will/might/could cut on his future income, and
thus he makes the software that is already installed there, unusable.
He *might* be wrong with his thinking, in that continued usability
of that software by his clients *might* even help him get future jobs
there, but from his very point of view, he *thinks* that it's the
other way round.
You have failed to provide a justification for society supporting the
vendor and helping enable and enforce this behavior.
Big chemical companies have an incentive to dump toxic waste willy-
nilly. Does society permit them to do so, or severely restrict how and
where they can dispose of waste and how it must be treated beforehand?
You cannot justify something with "it's in the interests of this
business here that has thus-and-such market cap".
Why does society not only condone but actually assist business
pollution of our property rights in our hardware and the arrangements
of bits resident on that hardware? That is precisely what it is --
pollution, taking our stuff and by artifice degrading its value, and
creating a toxic environment with ripple-on harmful effects besides
(e.g. orphan works, vendor lock-in, lack of competition, the need to
seek all sorts of permission before you are allowed to innovate or be
creative...all well-documented problems with copyright and patent.)
If you *think* it will be a hot sunny day, you probably leave your
raincoat at home when going for a walk, and then it might start to
rain cats and dogs, and afterwards who damn yourself for not having
taken your raincoat with you. But you wouldn't want government to
rule that you must take your raincoat with you ...
You're right. Government should stay out of it. Instead government
steps in and enforces that since some big businesses don't take their
raincoats with them, and "big business is doubleplusgood!!!1!11one",
therefore rain is outlawed! Despite a) the obvious impossibility of
perfectly enforcing this decree, b) that even partial enforcement is
damned expensive and difficult (e.g. doming over every major urban
area), and c) even partial enforcement tramples on rights (e.g. what
happens to astronomers, air travel, people who actually like the rain,
people with gardens whose tapwater is metered and that can't afford to
use extra tapwater to replace the lost rainfall, and various forms of
wireless communications if they dome over every major urban area?)
Because it's part of an agreement...
I'll rephrase. Why does anyone "agree" to such lopsided "agreements"
instead of simply shopping elsewhere?
If law wasn't there to make accepting such agreements the only
legal way for the customer to use the software
How fortunate for the everyday people of limited means that indeed
that law isn't there then!
Read 17 USC section 117(a)(1) sometime and enlighten yourself. You are
permitted by law to make private copies as part of normal use of
software, e.g. installation and the transient copies in RAM. No
special permission from the copyright holder is required; only that
you purchased a copy legitimately. Which you (hypothetically) did at
the retail outlet. Having purchased the copy, you may now use it as
you see fit without any need for permission from the copyright holder,
save that such permission is needed by law if you intend to distribute
copies, and perhaps if you intend to make private copies beyond those
the software automatically requires or makes in normal use and prudent
backups.
The software vendor has no need of the onerous "license terms" to
protect their (illegitimate) interest in preventing free copying;
copyright law does that anyway. Or at least tries.
It's not that most would be open and free then, but rather non-existing.
Evidence?
If law was changed to make copying principially legal, then these
vendors would adapt to a new one, which isn't necessarily more to
your likings: they would program their software such, that it
requires pay per use (that is rent).
Pay per use is even less justified on economic or public-policy
grounds than pay per copy. If the law made copying principally legal
it would certainly make sense to make hacking and tinkering to work
around attempts to enforce pay per use legal as well. Pay per use then
would, as it should, be viable only for stuff like Everquest where you
use a vendor's server resources by using the software. Without payment
they refuse access to the server. Without access to the server the
software's not very useful. Working around that requires actual theft
(of services), i.e. costing the vendor something without paying them
to cover their added expenses due to your usage, and theft would
obviously still be against the law.
Circumventing a gratuitous use of a vendor's server not intrinsically
needed to perform the software's function should however be possible
without compromising the software's function. In the simplest case of
a gratuitous phone-home enforcement check, you'd just decompile the
software and figure out how to spoof an "authorized" response, then
cut the vendor out of the loop entirely. Their server resources are
not consumed so there's nothing you're costing them with each use to
justify them demanding payment any more anyway.
This would be legal if copyright, patent, and the DMCA were
eliminated. It should be legal.
Only a marginal number of vendors could/would adapt to business models like redhat.
Evidence?
Copyright law isn't there to make software-prices high, it's there
to *enable* less complicated ways (and thus of course cheaper ways!)
for distribution of software
That's mythological bullturds. It enables no such thing. The cheapest
way to distribute software, also spreading the burden evenly across
its users and making it touch each one extremely lightly indeed, is
called BitTorrent. If your theory were correct, copyright law would
have resulted in BT being the predominant means of distribution of
software. In fact, BT IS the predominant means of distribution of one
type of software -- free software, which has been copylefted, that is.
So in fact copyright law RETARDS less complicated (and cheaper) ways
of distributing software. Demonstrable, incontrovertible FACT. You are
wrong. YHL. HTH. HAND.
Oh, and finally, unless the copy I make of some inventor's idea will
cause remuneration to go to the inventor, it is immoral.
Incorrect. Alice invents something. Bob implements it using his own
time, money, and materials. Bob's doing so has clearly not deprived
Alice of anything. In fact, Bob may do this in secret; and what Alice
doesn't know doesn't hurt her. No harm, no foul. No foul, no
immorality. This too is airtight logic, unless you redefine "immoral"
to be "whatever I don't like" instead of "what malicious or
irresponsibile actions threaten or cause measurable harm to a
nonconsenting other".
You naively think that, after removing something of your dislike,
the space wouldn't be filled by something even more to your (and
other's) dislike.
You have no evidence to support your theory that it would be. And by
the way, you misspelled "naïve".
