On Wed, 31 Dec 2003, David Phillips wrote: > My apologies for the last message. Mail client issues. > > Jack Ungerleider writes: > > One of the scenarios I read about (I apologize if this > > has been touched on, I missed the beginning of the thread) talks > > about receiving a file from a "blacklisted" copy of Office. Your copy > > of Office would refuse to open the file. The first time this happens > > in a legal, regulatory, or other "emergancy" situation you can bet > > there will be a lawsuit to undo the controls. > > Ignore the fact that this is Microsoft. Doesn't that sound like a great way > to protect your software from being illegally copied? > > This is not a privacy violation. If such protection were implemented, the > end users of both copies of the software would have agreed when agreeing to > the EULA. (Ignore the issue of whether or not EULAs are legal. The point > is that the users understood how the software worked and agreed before using > it.) Well, legally that's true, but the fact remains that I wouldn't consider the text within any EULA that I've read recently to be English. The words are all English, but I would consider it to be "legalese" because without a fair amount of legal training it is quite difficult to understand everything that is being stated. On top of that, are they actually going to tell you exactly what will or won't work if you're violating the EULA? Probably not; they'll probably just say that functionality will be broken somehow. On top of that, how will that deal with 3rd party editors? OpenOffice currently works for me to open, edit and save documents that people have created in MS Word format. But if there's a check in there for some unique number, you can bet your bacon that Microsoft will figure out what OO and other editors are using for their number, and make those act the same as pirated office versions. Sure, I'll still be able to open them, but I'll have to return them in a different format, or the recipient will nto be able to open it if they're running Word. I'm sure that most people on this list have experience with how people react when you do something like that to them... ------------- Justin Kremer <kremer at ringworld.org> _______________________________________________ TCLUG Mailing List - Minneapolis/St. Paul, Minnesota http://www.mn-linux.org tclug-list at mn-linux.org https://mailman.real-time.com/mailman/listinfo/tclug-list