Just because it’s free doesn’t mean the owner doesn’t have rights. (This is also the basis of the GPL.)
It's about the damages.
I hope that aspect get appealed and a more reasonable punishment is found.
From my reading though, it didn’t seem like he did plead guilty to the copyright infringement of the data, only the logos. I don’t know what all of the counts were, but he only plead to a subset of them. And going in, his press interviews seemed to suggest that he didn’t quite get what the problem was.
But again, the punishment seems really harsh.
In addition, if we are talking about general content of the Microsoft website, search engines routinely index store and cache the contents, and offer to serve it to third parties, without any intervention from Microsoft.
So no, if you post it on a website society recognizes that you are offering to allow a host of intermediaries copy and serve the content to intended end-users. Maybe this guy isn't all that sympathetic, maybe it's a little confusing because we are talking about CDs and binaries, but when you sit down and think about it this decision makes no sense.
What a colossal waste of resources.
Lundgren should not have been sentenced to prison for this. At most he should have been punished for trademark infringement.
It’s a god damn travesty that we have judges who don’t seem to understand the very important technical details of the court cases they are judging in.
>The original Microsoft (COA) attached to the PC does not allow you to reload Microsoft Windows software when no original recovery media is present.
https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/mssmallbiz/2011/10/05/looki...
So that's the crucial point. Yes, the software was free to download, but you needed the original recovery disk to legitimately sell a refurbished computer. By creating counterfeit disks he would enable refurbishers to avoid the fee to Microsoft.
Thank you for digging this up. This is an important point, and I think a lot of us, including myself and the hapless recycler, have naively assumed that sticker plus iso equals a legit install in Microsoft's eyes. Nevertheless, it's still a travesty that he was convicted for this.
Conviction seems fine. The fine is debatable but roughly okay. It’s the jail time that makes no sense.
There's no other logical explanation. No one would go through the trouble of exactly replicating a physical CD with logos and all unless they had nefarious intentions.
In other words MS are trying very hard to make selling refurbished computers impractical, so please throw it away, and buy a new one with new Windows licence.
If the judge was on the ball the man should have been found guilty and fined 1c and attention drawn to ridiculous licencing in his summing up. Better for justice of course would be throwing out the terms of the licence and finding him not guilty.
So the $25 is the cost, to Dell etc, of volume purchase of Windows OEM along with the sticker with licence number.
Utterly unrelated to a restore disk for a machine that already has the sticker, and thus a valid licence.
That he is found guilty is a travesty.
Anyone with a license can download the ISO. Even then, you need the license to activate it once it's installed.
This guy was just providing the ISO burned onto a disk, with instruction for the user on how to activate it with their existing license.
Microsoft lost zero revenue - they just don't want people extending the life of their license, because they would rather people needlessly purchase additional licenses...