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The information on Groklaw is not intended to constitute legal advice. While Mark is a lawyer and he has asked other lawyers and law students to contribute articles, all of these articles are offered to help educate, not to provide specific legal advice. They are not your lawyers.

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To both: Depends on Jurisdiction | 751 comments | Create New Account
Comments belong to whoever posts them. Please notify us of inappropriate comments.
To both: Depends on Jurisdiction
Authored by: Anonymous on Thursday, October 04 2012 @ 02:00 PM EDT

IANAL!

To answer "up two posts":

If you compile it on your home computer and just make personal use of it, that's okay.
I wouldn't be too sure of that in the US Jurisdictions.

To answer "up one post":

If the original author did not put a copyright notice of some kind, a statement that it is in the public domain, or a license telling you that you have permission, you have no right to use the software at all, and certainly not to distribute it.
On the point of "you have no right to use" I don't think there's a Jurisdiction anywhere that agrees with your conclusion. Please either:
    A: Point to the part in Law that specifies that
or
    B: Point to the case that focuses specifically on the USE of a copyright protected work of which use is not outlined in a license and the case declared the defendant in breach by simply using the copyright protected work
Try to find a very clear example please - like a copyright holder went after an owner of cd because the owner used it in their truck player and not just their home entertainment unit. Going specifically into the software world ends up being really grey as the licenses combine on top of Copyright Law putting additional restrictions on the product that would otherwise not exist.

Remember - we're talking about what Copyright Law allows or doesn't allow - not licenses.

With regards whether or not you require a license, I believe in the Canadian Jurisdictions it is the responsibility of the entity making a work available to ensure it's available under Copyright Law legally. For the downloader, I believe there was a recent case against the recording industry that was upheld on appeal which made it clear that a downloader is perfectly within their rights under copyright law to download for personal uses.

It is rather disappointing that after umpteen years of Groklaw, people are still confusing the lack of a copyright notice with a right to copy.
No surprise - we all overlook things such as that of the Fair Use aspects of Copyright Law allowing copying under certain conditions even against the permissions of the copyright owner :)

Remember when the RIAA said "fair use = unauthorized and unauthorized = illegal" and the Judge responded "I dun think so!".

RAS

[ Reply to This | Parent | # ]

Temporary copy in RAM
Authored by: Wol on Thursday, October 04 2012 @ 05:52 PM EDT
Actually, this is now (in most jurisdictions) an explicit right of the owner of
the copy, not the copyright owner. So that's not the problem you think it is.
Plus of course there's the implied licence when you bought the software in the
first place (unless you bought one of those MS "media only" CD
packages :-)

Think back to when the "right to make a backup copy" went into US law.
Most software (as visible to the man in the street - aka known as a
congress-crittur?) came on floppies, and was used on computers that did NOT have
a hard drive. That legislation was intended for you to be able to copy the disk
you'd bought, sling the original in the safe, and work from your copy until it
failed at which point the original came out of the safe and you made another
copy. Ad infinitum (until computers with 5 *mega*byte hard disks appeared. 5
megs!?!?)

Cheers,
Wol

[ Reply to This | Parent | # ]

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