Illegal? I don't know *what* you're talking about!

[Not_a_Miracleworker]

Heard this from our Big Overlord Boss' mouth today....
background: One of the older macs up front has issues, mostly due to the fact that it only has a 12(!!)GB HD on it, and it's LOADED with crap they refuse to remove. Well, turns out that Word does not like to run on this comp (go figure), so Big Overlord Boss (BOB) was in today to "look into the problem". /background

BOB: Do we have that disc for Word around here somewhere?

Me & CW: No, it's probably in the safe with the rest of the software....

So he goes to sort through the software discs... no luck. Then I hear this:

BOB: Oh well, I'll just as (abused tech at sister business) to copy their disc and use that one. Hopefully that'll work.

Me:

I'm pretty sure most software discs have anti-piracy locks on them, correct? Granted this is an ANCIENT version of Word, but still. Is it that hard to pick up a newer version? Not that that POS comp would be able to handle it...

Don't know what to do, or if I *should* do anything.

[lordlundar]

Don't know what to do, or if I *should* do anything.

Well, despite considering that If asked about it, anyone in Microsoft would probably laugh at the idea of pursuing charges over a decade old version (I'm guessing, as those were the last ones without active DRM), refusing to be involved in it is your best bet.

[Shalom]

If they did once have an official copy of the program, then they've paid for the license to use it, regardless of whether they know the current location of that program disk, no? Why then would it matter whether he uses his disk, her disk, my disk, or one he downloaded from alt.binaries.warez? He's paid for it regardless. It's kinda like radio stations and records: as long as they pay the public-performance fee, does it matter where they got the CD (or LP) from?

For that matter, I remember back when stuff came on less-than-reliable 5¼" disks, you could call the software company and ask for a replacement disk, and if you could prove you already paid, they'd send you another one free, or for just the cost of the media.

[Andara Bledin]

As much as a lot of content providers want to deny it, in the US at least, the doctrines of fair use allow for anyone who purchases media to make backup copies of said media.

This is actually rather less relevant with software, since software usually requires a key or some form of registration to work, and so the media itself is often of minor importance.

^-.-^

[infinitemonkies]

The software we use at the hotel is really terrible. It's a DOS-based program running on windows 3.11, and it was last updated in 1997.

Also, our user license expired in 2001. For the last 8 or 9 months, I've been trying to convince management that since we're using software illegally anyway, we might as well just steal something current and not sucktacular.

[Alephcat]

... our user license expired in 2001. For the last 8 or 9 months, I've been trying to convince management that since we're using software illegally anyway, we might as well just steal something current and not sucktacular.

Try and get them to go for something that does not require the purchase of a licence that way it will be cheap and you will never run into this problem again.

[Andara Bledin]

The software we use at the hotel is really terrible. It's a DOS-based program running on windows 3.11, and it was last updated in 1997.

Also, our user license expired in 2001.

One of the programs that is stil in use at my place of work (only for the data it holds, and not for actual processing of anything) is DOS-based, was licensed through SCO, and expired sometime around 1996, which is a year after I started there, and it was still our main database until about 2000.

Luckily for me (as one of the prime data wranglers), we've actually upgraded twice, and are now using something that's current and still being developed and was actually designed for the industry we're a part of.

^-.-^