I purchased Sim City 4 when released. I fancy playing it again. It is currently sitting on a shelf 1200miles away from my computer and I won't be able to get hold of it for several months as I am working abroad for a period.
It is perfectly possible for me to download a backup copy that someone else has made and play it. Is that illegal and/or morally wrong?
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Things have moved on since I first joined...
certainly illegal, but potentially morally justifiable
Agreed.Originally Posted by directhex
Download it and get someone from home to email you the serial no. then... then it is sort of legal...
Is it actually illegal, in the UK, for definite? Assuming you could find a way to do so without uploading to anyone, and assuming there is no CD protection that needs to be bypassed.
Morally of course there is no issue, assuming that in the process you don't upload to anyone, or fund international terrorism. You have bought a license to install and use that software.
The laws around this are very complex and there are many loopholes, there are also very different laws for different countries.
This is why so many P2P sites stay online despite massive efforts from films and music companys to stop it.
The laws for the country you are in may want to be double checked
buying a retail game doesn't entitle you to download it
buying a vhs doesn't entitle you to download the blu-ray rip either
actually, under uk law, buying a cd doesn't even entitle you to rip it
It almost feels like the industry wants to get to teh point where buying a CD doesn't even entitle you to listen to it.
Obviously the biggest use for a lot of P2P programs, torrents etc.. is to download illegally but there are legal uses for it afterall which is why you can close torrent sites down but you'll never get to the torrent programs.
What is the punishment for ripping CD's these days. Since ever bugga on planet seems to have an ipod or similar lol
Stopping it seems like the worst thing they can try and do now. They need to utilise the infrastructure.
Look at movies now.. couple of years back major movie and tv releases didn't have global launches. So what do people do... download what other countries are getting before it gets to their country..then they dont bother watching it on tv.
Now more and more releases are global limiting the point in downloads.
Streaming is obviously the new enemy of record and movie companies..but why fight it when they should be finding a way to make money off it.
Last edited by staffsMike; 26-11-2007 at 01:23 AM.
I wonder if people would be willing to pay slightly more in order to have a license that'll enable them to legally download any future re-re-remastering on BD III and Super HD-DVD II (and any digital format before and after).
lol... I would pay extra for that!
But if that happened then they won't release old films in newer formats as it would only lose money...
Technically, I'd say yes it is, but it's a fairly fine line.
The law is (IMHO) fairly simple in principle, but increasing complex in practice. Copyright law says legit owners can create a "necessary" backup (of computer software), but it doesn't stipulate what can be done with it. Does it include transmitting it and installing from it? Dubious, but maybe. It certainly wouldn't include someone else making a backup of their own copy and sending it, but if it was a backup of Fabula's own copy .... erm ..... ?
But even if it is technically illegal, what are the implications of getting caught? Though copyright law does certainly go more into the criminal realm than it used to, the basic provisions (unless it's breached during the course of a business, which isn't the case here) is that it's a civil matter. So Fabula might theoretically get sued, but not prosecuted.
And if you get sued, the available remedies under copyright law) are :-
- seizure of offending copies
- injunction against further injunctions
- damages for loss suffered.
None of these represent much of a reason to be worried in a case like this. When Fabula owns a legit copy, it'd be hard to see how the copyright owner could claim that any breach represents much of a loss, and without that, there'll be no damages and hence no justification for a case to seek them. And there's arguably even less case for an injunction or seizure order.
It's faintly possible, I suppose, someone might seek one of the above out of bloody-mindedness, and that Fabula might end up with legal costs as a result, but personally I'd have thought that was so unlikely as to be a vanishingly small chance.
Morally, I agree with everybody else - it's not a problem. My (non-lawyer) opinion is that while technically illegal in the UK, it's not a problem worth worrying about legally either.
Laws in other countries will vary, of course, and many are more liberal towards "fair use" rights than we are. There've been noises about softening some aspects of copyright law in the UK (such as copying your own CDs to MP3 players, etc) but as far as I'm aware, they're still at the "talking about" stage and haven't occurred yet. Roll on the day.
Actually, UK industry bodies have said that they support a change in the law allowing legit owners to rip CD to MP3 for their own use, etc. The law just hasn't been changed (as far as I know) to catch up with either industry expectations or the realities of what happens in the world.
But .... that principle of not being allowed to copy even material you legitimately own goes back decades, certainly to the invention of the audio cassette and the taping of LPs, etc. To the best of my knowledge, there's never been a case of someone actually being taken to court for a personal-use copy of their own material .... or even for doing a friend or two a copy. It only really seems to be worth legal action if you're talking about fairly large scale copying, often (but not always) on a commercial basis, and certainly you're in trouble if you're counterfeiting and get caught. But a bit of personal copying has been going on without raising much in the way of legal hackles for several decades ..... and rightly so when you've paid out for the legit version in the first place.
I was under the impression that re-selling Software, CDs & Games was in violation of the license? Anyway if that is the case then buying the game from an auction site may not be much more legal? Surely I'm mistaken?
There's at least two points there. One is that licences vary, so while one may try to impose that restriction, others may not. I haven't seen any that have said that, though they may well impose conditions on such sale, such as the transfer of all materials, removal of installation and destruction of backups, etc.
The second is whether the licence would be legally valid anyway. There's an argument that says that one party to a contract can't unilaterally change a contract after the contract has been made, and that by the time you get to see the licence, the contract has been made because that occurs at time of sale. Generally, I expect that a court would not exclude reasonable terms of a licence on this basis, but it is a certainty that they will exclude licence terms on the grounds on them being unreasonable. Exactly what is unreasonable, though, varies. Consumers, for instance, benefit from a rather greater level of protection from unfair contracts than businesses, so if you buy as a consumer, you're better protected than if you were a business. As a consumer, the Unfair Contract Terms Act provides the vehicle for such protection. So, if a licence is indeed valid, would specific conditions in it stand up to challenge. Well, for a certainty, there have been cases where specific sections in software licences have been thrown out.
The Unfair Terms in Consumer Contracts regulations also put a perspective on this :-
There are definitions of what "individually negotiated" means, but a standard software licence certainly isn't.s5(1) - A contractual term which has not been individually negotiated shall be regarded as unfair if, contrary to the requirement of good faith, it causes a significant imbalance in the parties' rights and obligations arising under the contract, to the detriment of the consumer.
I'm not a lawyer, but I rather doubt anyone could enforce a standard licence term saying you can't sell the licence on at all, but they may be able to impose requirements on doing so.
alsenior (28-11-2007)
Hmm?
Under UK law it doesn't allow to to rip a cd? where did you here that?
If that were the case surly the SW to copy wouldn't be legal and they would have locked the disc.
I'd like to know where you get that idea from, it wouldn't be part of windows media player and provide you with album info and cover art while you copy it to your hard drive.
It's only once you start to share that with other people it becomes a crime........ isn't it?
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