On Thu, 2010-07-29 at 06:56 -0500, Bruno Wolff III wrote: > There was a court case where a company was using a copyrighted phrase > for access control. A competitor won when they also used the same > phrase for access control purposes. > > That was a long time ago and people seemed to feel that when a > customer bought something, they owned it. In today's environment that > case might have gone differently. Now, and long ago, buying something gave you the thing to use. It never made it legal/right for you to blatantly rip off the design. i.e. Copyright and patents have been around for decades. You've always been liable for a whole mess of legal trouble if you ripped off someone else's product. It's not a new problem. Even if you do manage to get away with reverse engineering something that's not covered by a patent, or you find some loophole, you still stand the chance of getting your just deserts from the original manufacturer, when they, with their years of R&D into their product that they have, and you don't, trump your attempt with a new and better, or deliberately incompatible, model. -- [tim@localhost ~]$ uname -r 2.6.27.25-78.2.56.fc9.i686 Don't send private replies to my address, the mailbox is ignored. I read messages from the public lists. -- users mailing list users@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx To unsubscribe or change subscription options: https://admin.fedoraproject.org/mailman/listinfo/users Guidelines: http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Mailing_list_guidelines