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Old 01-18-2011, 08:12 AM   #33
mr ploppy
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Location: Yorkshire, tha noz
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Quote:
Originally Posted by Fastolfe View Post
Thanks for your work Alf.

I understand your decision and I probably would do the same. But I find it rather scary that the author of a perfectly legal piece of software feels the need to distance himself from it, "just in case".

It's rather telling of how well the entertainment industry's lobbying and scare tactics are working: If you were a knifesmith, you probably wouldn't feel the need to stop forging knives just in case someone might sue you because one of your knives could be used to kill someone. You know the case would be thrown out immediately. Yet as a software engineer working on a harmless piece of software, you feel more threatened than the knifesmith. That's how biased toward corporate interests our legal system has become, and it's really sad.
It's more about the way they are advertised. If you said "my knives are great for stabbing people, you can slice people's heads off with them and they are very easy to hide" you would probably be looking for trouble.

One of the commercial usenet providers (can't remember which) advertised themselves as being great for downloading free music, movies, games, etc and got themselves a big fine as a result. None of the other usenet providers were affected by that.

But this is more of a "Dave's Classics" type of situation, where too much good publicity in a short period of time has been its (voluntary) undoing.
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