Armed Polite Society
Main Forums => The Roundtable => Topic started by: Hawkmoon on February 15, 2018, 08:10:42 PM
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http://www.latimes.com/business/technology/la-fi-microsoft-restore-disc-20180215-story.html
Guy tries to reduce waste in the world by making it easier for people to restore their licensed copy of Windows, gets jail sentence for reward.
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While I applaud the thought something still seems a bit, well, off. His restore discs were produced to exactly, or at least very closely, mimic a factory product. That alone raises a red flag. Add to that the fact he was selling them as independent products rather than providing them at no cost with a refurbished machine and it's hard to argue his intent was purely altruistic. The final nail in the coffin is that he's apparently been part of the tech and business world for some time. One would presume he would be well aware the aforementioned actions are, at best, skating on very thin legal ice.
It'll be interesting to see how it plays out. If it is, as he said, "just a misunderstanding", I would think an offer to replace all existing discs with ones properly labeled (i.e. without OEM trademarked logos and such) would be a long step towards a serious reconsideration of his case.
Brad
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Add to that the fact he was selling them as independent products rather than providing them at no cost with a refurbished machine and it's hard to argue his intent was purely altruistic.
I thought his goal was ostensibly to sell the discs to companies that refurbish machines so they could be distributed with those machines. In other words, sell a thousand discs to a refurbisher to distribute with the machines they resell (along with the valid licenses already associated with them) because those discs rarely survive to be turned in with the machines that get refurbed.
Also not sure that lack of purity of altruism should ever be the measure of legality. Very few people do anything with pure altruistic intent, and I'm not Marxist enough to think that making money to do good things makes those good things bad.
The final nail in the coffin is that he's apparently been part of the tech and business world for some time. One would presume he would be well aware the aforementioned actions are, at best, skating on very thin legal ice.
Meh. He was selling discs for which ISOs can be downloaded for free from Dell's website.
It'll be interesting to see how it plays out. If it is, as he said, "just a misunderstanding", I would think an offer to replace all existing discs with ones properly labeled (i.e. without OEM trademarked logos and such) would be a long step towards a serious reconsideration of his case.
Based on my reading no discs were ever distributed, so none need to be replaced. I agree that he should have given them different branding, but I don't think the crime was particularly nefarious.
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He should have known that selling copyrighted software is illegal...
but has "crimes" go, it sounds like one of the most harmless ones possible... ;/
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He sounds like a terrorist... he could have potentially infected 28,000 PCs with Windows 10.