Dennis Bathory-Kitsz wrote:
I don't agree that I'm conflating two issues. Language and law is the issue here. You have not persuaded me of the validity of your claim that the customer is being "victimized". I am not victimized. I bought a disk, and a book, and the rights, subject to limitations spelled out in the end user license, to non-exclusive use of software. Among the limitations I agreed to are the right to use the software on one machine at a time. That is, and has been, in the plain language of the agreement for as long as I've been using Finale. And I would guess, if I wanted to pay the appropriate licensing fee, that I could purchase a "site license", under he terms of which there would be no restriction on the number of machines upon which I would be permitted to install the software, and thus, no need for the authentication scheme. I don't need the ability to load the software on more than one machine at a time, though, and so choose not to pay for that priviledge.Noel, you're conflating two issues. Your argument is about language and law. Whenever anyone buys a physical manifestation of 'intellectual property', they purchase a certain body of rights, implicit and explicit. That's IP101.
And that's not the issue. The issue is commerce and trade and, in this
case, the customer's victimization -- irrespective of the language and law
used to promulgate and disguise offensive tethering practices.
Frankly, though I do not mean to make any accusations in saying this, I have heard the arguements you raise about "victimware" years ago, from a person who was a first rate tech, and who did not hesitate for a moment to copy an application off of a customer's drive if it was one he wanted. He, too, railed against copy protection schemes.
Language and law never relieve a company of ethical responsibility to the customer, and ultimately companies who are unethical pay the price in bankruptcy.Not necessarily so. As far as I can tell, the structure of a finale data file is public knowledge, and there is nothing to prevent a person with the proper skills form devising a notation package that would properly render any Finale data file. Furthermore, since Finale Notepad (and I refer here to the free download), which will presumably print out any file that the full featured Finale of the same flavor will print out means that even if, for some reason, you cannot edit a 2k5 file, you can still print it out, disproving your claim that your intellectual property is beholden to the "corporate owners".
Victimware is what you get when you buy tethered software, and no matter
how you spin the language or law, you and *your* intellectual property
become beholden to the corporate owners for the *rest of their life* (not
yours!) in a permanent digital serfdom.
If ending victimware production means Coda/MM has to negotiate better termsCoda / MM need not negotiate better terms; I don't see the current situation as a "rights nightmare", I don't consider that I become a victim if the licensee institutes a mechanism to enforce the restrictions in the license agreement, and I haven't claimed (as far as I recall) that the situation is difficult.
-- or that the industry as a whole has to negotiate their way out of the
rights nightmare that *they themselves* have created due to laziness and
greed -- then they need to make that happen. They have not earned my
sympathy. Somehow other companies (and I list some of them in my article)
have managed to do what you claim is so difficult. It's about will, about
ethics, about a customer-centrism that has absented itself from much
corporate mentality, including Coda/MM's.
Do you have a serious, fully functional proposal that doesn't make you the ultimate
victim (when Coda/MM goes under, changes their terms, or ceases to support
your software)?
Sure. Make certain I have the latest verion of Notepad.
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