It seems a little strange to be writing about a piece of Windows software here, because I’ve not used Windows for about 5 years. It turns out that, while I’ve been happily ripping my CDs and encoding them with Ogg Vorbis, the unfortunate souls still using the other OS are having to put up with some sort of ropey media player that tries to stop you from transferring your media files to other computers you own, to your portable music player and so on.
All is not lost for those people though, because some enterprising chap has produced a utility that defeats this control mechanism. Because it seems that Microsoft deem possession of the utility to be copyright infringement (which is obviously isn’t), many sites are unable or unwilling to host the program. I don’t agree with Microsoft’s stance against fair use, so I’m hosting a copy here for anyone who wants it. You can get it on the FairUse4WM download page. The copyright of this file belongs to the author of the utility, not Microsoft. If the author wishes that I remove the file, then I’ll gladly do so.
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The British government is being encouraged to help the BSA (the Business Software Alliance), who are the proprietary software industry’s kneecap gang, enforce the purchasing of software licenses by fining those who are found to be lacking the required licences.
Contrary to what you might think, I’m actually in favour of this.
For starters, the general procedure for companies who fail to purchase licenses is a knock at the door, followed by the rapid purchase of said missing licenses. Once the company is in compliance, then the BSA have nothing else left that they can do. The BSA would like to punish companies who fail to buy licenses as well as just having the licenses bought, so given that 80% of infringements are down to oversight and not malice, it might give companies another reason to avoid the proprietary licensing in the first place and move to free software where you don’t need to keep a careful count of what you’re using. Believe me, I’ve managed licensing before and it’s a complete pain.
Also, if the government is going to enforce Microsofts, Adobes and the rest of the software industrys licensing requirements, by rights it should also enforce Free software licenses such as the GPL. It’s always sad to see the companies wilfully breaking the GPL by incorporating GPL licensed software into their products, and by and large they do this because they know that the guy who wrote it doesn’t have the legal means or the cash to bring a civil case.
If the government will enforce this type of license violation, then it can only be a good thing.
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