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Originally Posted by roger the rabbit
One point you have missed is that "certain well known maker of operating system software" rose to where they are by firstly giving away their software, then turning a blind eye to home copy usage. A ploy to make everybody a convert, whether or not it worked is subjective.
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I guess you're right. I never really knew all the background to it. The early machines I bought came bundled with legitimate and official free DOS disks of some kind, and there was certainly never any sense that sharing it around was frowned on. It still seems to be a popular way to get market penetration - give your programs away for free until they're well known and then slowly try to reel the customers in to paid versions.
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because of where I live experienced the GR situation, in an ever increasing number of cases I am unable to buy English language versions of the eBooks I want.
So what is the alternative? - Commit fraud by lying about where I live? - a criminal offence. Or what?
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There's a phrase that keeps cropping up in the publishing debate in Australia - "Parallel Imports". I think that there's room to coin a similar one - "Parallel Ethics" to describe the reality that there isn't
and never will be a state of universal agreement on what constitutes that "action of a reasonable man" that the law is supposed to be considering. I suspect that when it comes to e-books, most of us will go our own different ways without spending too much time worrying about a knock on the door from the E-police.