It is my post but it's about people buying education bundles and discounts even they are not students or school-related people. So yeah, dont tell me.
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Is it illegal to purchase pro apps with education discount if you are not eligible?
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It is my post but it's about people buying education bundles and discounts even they are not students or school-related people. So yeah, dont tell me.
The presumption that the "thief" would otherwise have paid full price is central to your argument. Your own words:
...no - it's not - unlike physical products that cost significant money/resources to replace, the creator/retailer has only 'lost' the potential sale to the "thief".
...which is where you're claiming "full cost" bit. Again, physical goods have significant marginal cost (look it up) so your "switching price tags" scenario can easily let the thief pay less than the cost of producing the goods. Digital sales have close-to-zero marginal costs (downloading a file costs the host pennies).
The straw man here is the idea that anybody saying that unlicensed software isn't theft must be condoning the use of unlicensed software.
What "item"? With digital sales there's no "item" - just an intangible "right to copy" and that is only needed because of a bit of (relatively) modern legislation created to protect music publishers from those evil player pianos (or suchlike).
Your argument is akin to saying that, if someone walks across your lawn without permission, then they've stolen a month's rent (or whatever arbitrary value you care to make up a justification for) from you. Trespassing may be wrong, but it isn't theft.
If you feel it's illegal call your local police department. If you know of a crime and don't report it you become an accessory after the fact! I'm sure they will be glad to to investigate and catch these bad boys!
If you feel it's illegal call your local police department. If you know of a crime and don't report it you become an accessory after the fact! I'm sure they will be glad to to investigate and catch these bad boys!
But do Apple investigate and punish those buyers systematically? Do they even have rules and terms for that?
The rules are spelled out in the store when you buy educational software.
Apple - Legal - Sales Policies - U.S. Retail Sales
www.apple.com
I've never heard of them ever auditing any cases but they do reserve the right.... In their terms it says they reserve the right to audit any purchase and ask for proof, if you cannot provide proof, they reserve the right to charge your credit card for the difference in price.
Only Apple will know this unless there's someone on this forum that did time for doing it. Do the police investigate people stealing cars? Do you ask yourself this question before calling the police if you see a stolen car?
If you know someone who did something and didn't report it that means you're just as guilty
The amount of misinformation about the law in this thread is mind boggling.
The following applies to the US. Other countries can be different.
- Knowing of a crime and not reporting it does not make you an accessory after the fact.
- Posting about breaching software terms on a public forum is fine.
- Breaching a software terms is not criminal, period.
- Breaching a software terms, without something more, does not expose you to civil liability.
- - Something more can be, for example, using education software to make a profit by making and selling something using that software or using the software to consult professionally.
- - Using education software for one's own fun without making a profit is probably insufficient to find damages for Apple.
The following applies to the US. Other countries can be different.
- Knowing of a crime and not reporting it does not make you an accessory after the fact.
- Posting about breaching software terms on a public forum is fine.
- Breaching a software terms is not criminal, period.
- Breaching a software terms, without something more, does not expose you to civil liability.
- - Something more can be, for example, using education software to make a profit by making and selling something using that software or using the software to consult professionally.
- - Using education software for one's own fun without making a profit is probably insufficient to find damages for Apple.
Then there's the moral argument that theft is bad, whether there's economic harm or not. At the level of morality, society sets norms for right and wrong. Taking something that belongs to someone else is the "wrong." It violates the concept of personal property. Even in communist societies where the people as a whole own the property, one person taking something for their personal use (depriving the rest of society of that use) is still considered a violation of property rights.
Picking flowers from a neighbor's garden, though negligible in economic harm (well, unless they're some sort of rare plant), is still a violation of the neighbor's rights - their right to enjoy the use/benefit of what they own, and their right to dispose of that property as they wish - even if it's nothing more than to have a moment of pleasure when glancing out their window. They can tell their neighbors, "Feel free to pick flowers from my garden." If so, they've granted the necessary license. Without that license it's theft.
In the case of a discount... The property owner has stated the terms under which a buyer can obtain the discount. Whether there are legal penalties is besides the point - if someone violates the terms, then they've violated the seller's property rights. It's the difference between a buyer and seller negotiating a price for an item (the seller agrees to the price the buyer wants to pay, or the sale doesn't take place), and the "buyer" taking a $20 item off the shelf, tossing $10 on the counter (the amount the buyer is willing to pay), and running out the door. If the seller didn't agree to the price, the seller is still within rights to call the police. The police aren't going to ask, "Did you still make a profit at $10?"
We accept the notion that there will never be 100% compliance with law/morality. But society is dependent upon having a substantial percentage of (mostly voluntary) compliance. Order vs. chaos. Having social order brings huge (often grossly under-appreciated) benefits. If we lose sight of those benefits, we lose the benefits entirely.
Oh, and about copyright and patent law... you might spin it as some sort of evil plot by the music business, but it goes far deeper than that (and goes much farther back than player pianos). It addresses the basic problem that some "things" that society values (a good story, an emotionally soothing melody, a better mousetrap) can be so easily duplicated by others that the creator receives little or no compensation for having created it. Certainly, when that creation is highly popular, the existence of intellectual property right means someone can become enormously wealthy. However, why should wealth be limited to owners of land and hoarders of gold? With no fundamental right as the creator, there isn't even fame-without-fortune - everyone can claim authorship (there's no plagiarism if there's no property to steal). And the true author? He/she can either find quiet satisfaction that the invention everyone is using came from his/her mind, or he/she can descend into bitterness because he/she has received nothing in exchange.
IP law was created because society saw the economic and social benefit of giving creators/inventors an economic incentive to pursue that activity. That incentive underlies our entire, industrialized modern world.
Just because there is no significant cost associated with producing a "copy" of something doesn't mean that it cost nothing to produce. There is R&D, there is overall cost to produce the product. And stealing it, or getting it for a reduces price through fraudulent activity/claims is still morally reprehensible.
But then, who really needs morals anyway.
Breaching software terms is a copyright violation, which is a felony with up to 1 year in jail in the minimum case and longer periods depending on how much was at stake (18 U.S. Code § 2319). Copyright infringement can be prosecuted as a civil or criminal matter, but the fact that it still is a criminal offense.
False false. You said one thing that might be true.
1. It might not even be a breach of the software terms. For example, the license agreement for Final Cut Pro X is exactly the same whether you buy it full price or as part of the education bundle. https://www.apple.com/legal/sla/docs/FinalCutProX.pdf And it doesn't mention any relevant limitations or qualifications on Education users. So I'm not even sure there is any breach in such a situation at all.
2. Breaching software terms is not a copyright violation. You may be liable for copyright infringement if you reproduce, distribute, display or perform a copyrighted work. Merely breaching a contract, without more, is none of those things.
3. Even if you do breach the contract and do something more to constitute copyright infringement, then it's still not a criminal offense unless you do it for financial gain. I've studied this - there has never been a case of criminal copyright infringement prosecuted for installing one piece of software under an improper license. All criminal copyright infringement cases involve fairly large scale bootlegging sale or rental operations (guy on the corner selling burned CDs, sketchy bodega renting burned DVDs, etc.).
4. There is no mandatory mininum 1 year sentence. Jail at all for this kind of thing is SUPER rare. https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/18/2319
It might be true that you could be subject to a civil suit, but its extremely unlikely. Apple would be hard pressed to show real damages from a single improper sale of education software - the amount might be low enough for small claims court. And Apple would not be able to get an injunction as there is no irreparable harm.
I think it depends on the qualifications. It's usually up to the party imposing restrictions and qualifications to actually verify compliance. That's not the consumers burden.
For example, let's consider that you need to be 21+ to buy liquor at a liquor store. If the liquor store actually checks IDs, and a teenager presents a fake ID to a liquor store clerk to get alcohol and gets it, the teenager presented convincing but fraudulent proof and thus is responsible. But if the liquor store doesn't check IDs at all and they sell to a teenager, then it's on the liquor store because they failed to verify.
If Apple doesn't bother verifying the education discounts, I think it's fairly on Apple if anyone gets it that shouldn't. As we all know, merely clicking a text-box affirming something is not sufficient verification. (How many 16 years olds click, "Yes I am 18" on adult websites?) Apple could do like youthdiscount.com and actually verify .edu emails or check scanned student IDs, but they don't. That's their business decision and whatever happens as a result is on them.
To place the burden on consumers to comply would be chaotic. Lots of software licenses are quite complex and regular consumers should not be expected to fully understand a hundred page document just to qualify themselves for a purchase.
17 USC 506 says it's a crime if you do it for purposes of "private financial gain". Using software you are not entitled to is private financial gain, since you're avoiding buying a copy you are legitimately entitled to.
I never said there was. I said in the minimum case, the maximum penalty was 1 year.
Realistically, it doesn't happen, but it still is a criminal offense. Otherwise the law would be written to exclude such cases.
The software license was acquired under false pretenses and therefore invalid, and therefore you have no rights to use the copyrighted software.
Similar case is say you don't pay the rent. That's a civil matter. But in some states, it then becomes criminal trespass, since you have no right to be on the property.
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Make sure you report it to the police too just in case it's a crime. Call your local police department non emergency number
Forget that, if you report it to the industry trade group BSA, you can get a reward.
Question:
If someone was to add a few zeros to their bank account via a hack, would you consider that to not be stealing, because it isn't physical goods removed from somebody's possession?
IMHO depriving somebody of a sale is very similar to theft, and the excuse that "I didn't remove any physical stuff to prevent the company selling to someone else" is a very tenuous argument.
I agree, its not identical... but there's still a financial impact in terms of "lost income" in both cases.
Using is not financial gain. There has to be actual financial gain for financial gain. Actual money coming in. OP didn't say what he would be using the software for. Plenty of people get pro software just to screw around for personal use. That is not financial gain.
Like I said, I've studied this very issue - criminal copyright infringement. I'm published on the topic. I've read every criminal copyright case in the US. It's not impressive because there are not many, hah. In every instance of private financial gain being the basis, there was actual revenue in the thousands of dollars from the infringement.
I'm not convinced it is. It's not like piracy where you obtain the software illegally. It's obtained from a legitimate source, but rather the license is improper. I'm not sure mislicensing falls in any recognized category of infringement. I'm not sure it's come up in civil cases like that exactly, but I know it has never come up in the criminal context.
Was it? Apple could have verified eligibility but chose not to. It's on them to verify their own eligibility policy in a contract of adhesion. I think a fair argument would be that any harm resulted from Apple's failure to do their due diligence, not on the consumer checking the wrong box, intentionally or not.
Completely irrelevant - if I pick your flowers, your flowers are gone. Even if they grow back - they might not - I've denied you of the right to use those particular flowers - whether for personal enjoyment or profit. That's where the "moral outrage" against theft comes from.
If, instead, I create an identical flower display in my own garden with my own flowers then I haven't, by any possible legal theory, stolen your flowers - they're still right there in your garden. Now, maybe if you make your living as a professional garden designer and I've undercut the local park for all to see, then you have a legitimate grievance and can get me for copyright violation - but you'll have to prove that under copyright law - not property law . Copying your award-winning flower arrangement may be dishonest but it isn't theft. The whole "copyright violation is theft" thing is a publicity campaign by Big IP to exaggerate the consequences of copyright violation to justify disproportionate penalties.
Copyright violation isn't theft in the same way that jaywalking isn't arson. That doesn't mean that any of them are good wholesome fun for the family - it does mean that some deserve stricter enforcement and harsher penalties than others.
Meanwhile, the growers that bred your flowers would very much like to be able to tell you that you "stole" their flowers by keeping some seed from last year and re-growing them without their permission, and that it said clearly in the small print that it was your responsibility to make sure that the bees had read the license agreement... So please continue arguing for a false equivalence between license violation and physical theft because it will make their job so much easier when they lobby the government to impose longer jail terms for unauthorised seed planting.
The difference is really very simple and pretty fundamental: you can't turn 1lb of gold into 2lb of gold by dragging it while holding down the Option key. Meanwhile, if your father once sold a bar of gold, you don't get paid every time it changes hands, whereas if your granddad was a successful rock star (or an industry agent who duped a successful rock star int signing away their rights) then, oh yes you do.
However, I'm not arguing against reasonable laws to protect designs and artworks - the problem is that the "copyright violation == theft" propaganda is being used to exaggerate the consequences of violations and justify ever increasing penalties and copyright terms (...the length of copyright protection is getting extended every time Mickey Mouse gets anywhere near the public domain - which is pretty rich for a company that has made billions out of recycling traditional fairy tales they copied for free).
Now you are confusing copyright violation with plagiarism. The two things are totally independent. I can quite legally reproduce the text of Hamlet (fortunately, Shakespeare is a lot older than Mickey Mouse, so he's out of copyright!) but if I claimed it as my own work I'd still be committing plagiarism. You can decide that your scientific paper should be free to all humankind and sign away any and all rights over it - but if I write in my name as "author" slot and submit it for my PhD I'm still gonna get (rightfully) thrown out of any respectable academic institution.
On the other hand, if I republish your photograph and clearly caption it "photograph by ApfelKuchen", no plagiarism is involved - I'm not passing it off as mine - but if I've used it without your permission then I've still violated your copyright (still haven't stolen your photograph, though - if anything, plagiarism is closer to theft if the plagiarist successfully convinces people that they, and not the victim, hold the rights to the work).
Well, the whole fiat currency thing is a bit of a leap of faith, but, pragmatically, the second they transfer/withdraw that money, someone has definitely lost money (even if it's buried in the balance sheets of a huge bank and you don't have much sympathy) and it's pretty clearly stealing. Realistically though, if someone is standing by your broken window holding your TV or walking briskly towards the shop exit with six designer handbags stuffed down their sweater then nobody would argue that it wasn't theft until they'd actually left the property.
But look at it another way - someone tweets that there's a bug in the bank's software that allows this, 1000 idiots add $1,000,000,000 to their balance, then realise that they can't withdraw more than $10k a day and, mostly, loose their nerve. Only a few hundred k actually gets withdrawn... but obviously the bank should claim the full $1tn from their insurers because that was potentially what might have been stolen - right? And all the 18-year-old idiots who followed the instructions on twitter to get a screenshot of a $1bn balance should be charged with the theft of the full $1bn (probably meaning huge minimum sentences in some jurisdictions)... ok?
That's the point here - not that software license violation somehow OK, but the "every illicit copy = 1 lost sale" fallacy is used by the industry to exaggerate losses and justify excessive sentences and draconian copyright laws.
If they didn't remove any physical stuff there wasn't necessarily any lost sale. Just because a zillion people download things for free from a warez site doesn't mean that a zillion people would have paid for it if it wasn't free. And it's not about providing an excuse for the perpetrator - its about debunking the ridiculous exaggerations of how much money is lost to "copyright theft".
I agree, I was playing devil's advocate because I find this an interesting discussion.
I definitely agree it isn't always 1 illegitimate copy = 1 lost sale for the company and thus they are due damages for that; however it does often mean that 1 illegitimate copy = 1 copy of something else that wasn't purchased or given increased market share to do the job.
So whilst it isn't always stealing from the original seller, it may well be preventing someone else getting a sale, or some open/free product getting a foot-hold. So its more like (when all the dodgy copies are taken in aggregate) stealing from society - if the person would have otherwise used something else.
Which imho is almost as bad.
The classic example is people pirating Windows and Office - if they didn't maybe they would have run macOS or Linux and LibreOffice instead. Which would result in more market share for those platforms and more consumer choice/less vendor lock in to Microsoft for the market as a whole.
E.g., in an abstract way, pirating software because you don't want to pay for it is anti-consumer and reinforces the vendor lock-in that exists. Which is really just another way of re-stating the above point I made earlier - some companies won't always prosecute because it reinforces their market share/vendor lock-in.
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No, I think that one is down to everybody learning to use Windows and Office at work and wanting to stick with the familiar. Anyway, it takes a significant effort to find a new computer without Windows pre-installed*.
Also, sorry, but for the average computer user, Linux, LibreOffice etc. just aren't as slick and easy-to-use as Windows or Office. Now, I've used Linux *a lot* - and from the command line it's often the best tool for technical jobs - but Linux desktop apps are like kicking a dead whale along a beach c.f. either Windows or MacOS. As for Libre/OpenOffice - I wrote a 250 page thesis in OpenOffice and, yeah, it's arguably better than Word for long, complex documents if you get your head around how the stylesheets and multi-file documents work. The deal-breaker, however, is that anything but the most trivial MS Office document gets its formatting mangled when you open it in Libre/Open office - if you have to work with MS Office users you need MS Office. The End. Also, the spreadsheet just isn't a patch on Excel. I think the difference is that MS spends a lot of R&D effort tailoring Office to what typical users want, while the Linux/Open Source world concentrates on what they think users ought to need (...resulting in hugely flexible, but inscrutable applications that make simple tasks unnecessarily difficult).
That said, Macs and Linux have hardly been a flop when you consider the massive headstart that DOS/Windows had (which started with CP/M, even before the IBM PC) and their history of anti-competetive practices. Android devices and linux-driven appliances are everywhere, last year, IBM acquired Red Hat for $34bn, Windows 10 now includes a Linux subsystem and MS produce software for Linux (SQL server and VS Code)... I think what that really says is that Linux/XOrg/Gnome/KDE/whatever just isn't compelling as a consumer desktop (Android, of course, junked the XOrg part and rolled their own GUI).
* one of MS's anti-competitive tricks in the past was to charge PC makers based on their total number of sales, whether or not they actually included Windows, and in any case it has always cost 3x as much to buy a full copy of Windows than even a one-off OEM 'only to be sold with a new computer' license.
OTOH someone who has just "saved" $500 by getting a five-finger discount on one bit software might spend some of that perceived saving on other hardware/software. To go back to the original topic - someone who got a pro apps bundle for $200 by pretending to be a student - trust me - start playing with Logic Pro and you'll soon spend more than the purchase price on plug-ins and hardware.
Trouble is - if you start getting too moralistic about it - you end up obsessing over the small number of total freeloaders, ignoring the positives, and throwing the baby out with the bathwater (...and doing stupid things like punishing legitimate users with obstructive DRM which is the first thing the pirates remove).
Software writers need to be paid or there won't be any new software (although the free/open source movement has shown that, largely because of the unique nature of digital distribution, that doesn't necessarily mean charging for software licenses).
I've made money by selling software in the past - I expect to be paid and expect the authorities to come down like a ton of bricks on industrial-scale, one-stop-shop warez sites (which are usually being run for commercial gain) that could seriously decimate sales... but 'casual' piracy for personal use? Goes with the territory.
I'm quite aware that there were probably a few dodgy copies for every legitimate one I sold... but I don't think for one moment that those could ever be turned into real income without doing more harm than good. I'm simultaneously aware that selling software is a really cushy deal where you start getting paid for the development costs with the first few copies sold. C.f. any sort of physical product where - on top of the time and effort of design and development - you have the huge cost of tooling up and producing a large enough initial batch to start selling (usually the point where you have to give away half of your business to get funding)... and that was in the bad old days of copying discs and printing manuals (still a minuscule cost c.f. the selling price). These days - $5/month for a web server (and what does 'printed manual' mean?). Or $100/year + 30% discount for the App Store - to cover distribution, billing and a shop window on every Apple device, and I don't even need to get set up to take cards...? Absolute. Freaking. Bargain. (I've had stores expecting a 50% discount after someone has walked in off the street holding my advert and asked them to order it for them - or resellers saying 'send us 5 units for free and as we sell those we'll re-order at 50% list').