[OT] Where ill conceived copyright laws can lead

[Bob Sneidar]

In one sense I can see your point, however the analogy breaks down in a couple ways. First, you could never have played the 45 on an 8 track or Cassette box. With software, purchasing a new PC does not necessarily mean you cannot run the software you purchased for the last one, and if it runs no one is asking you to buy the software again. I ran office 98 for years after it was waaay out of support. Now if you originally purchased Office for PC, then later buy a Mac, well you are going to have to pay full pop, unless you can work something else out with MS. 

Also, taking your example out to the ridiculous, how about a PC made in 2050? Should you expect that software today will run on it tomorrow? Where do you draw the line? How many upgrades are you entitled to? For your software to work in tomorrowland, more work is going to have to be done to it. Someone is going to have to pay for that work. 

As far as the royalties thing goes, it's an imperfect way to make sure the artists get paid based upon sales. Think of it from the other direction. The distributor decides to charge x for an lp. Oh but wait, the contract with the artists says that x/y of all sales goes to the artist! Hmmm... okay, distributor only gets x - (x/y), It's not an agreement with the consumer that is in play here. It is an agreement between the artist and the distributor based on actual sales, NOT based on consumer ownership. You are not paying the royalties per se, the distributor is. 

Bob

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On Oct 11, 2012, at 12:28 PM, Ralph DiMola wrote:

> To put this into perspective.....We write SW. When new technology comes out
> we can't expect the user to re-pay us just because they get a new PC/Mac.
> 
> Ralph DiMola