Comment by edw | Hacker News Reader

Comment by edw | Hacker News Reader

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If you take license violations very seriously, then I imagine that an audit of your computer would reveal no movies, songs, fonts, or applications that are not properly licensed, right?

Is Apple out of compliance with the license? Perhaps. Is this on my list of the ten thousand things I'm most concerned about? No.

And as for your assertion about Microsoft suing Apple in a heartbeat over a similar compliance issue, I think you don't know what you're talking about. Microsoft, to the best of my knowledge, hasn't sued anyone over the hundreds of MS patents they claim Linux violates. It took Apple a few years to get around to suing Samsung.

In other words, Companies' legal teams are usually subject to adult supervision by their CxOs. They don't just go around suing willy-nilly. Many lawyers see conflicts that lead to lawsuits as failures.

Reality is so surprisingly messy.

If an audit of his computer revealed unlicensed movies, songs, fonts and applications, I (and probably he) would fully expect him to be litigated against -- such discoveries and resulting lawsuits are quite commonplace nowadays, it seems like. That doesn't make it right for anyone, even a large corporation, to violate intellectual property law.

To put another way: if I were found to be pirating Mac OS X, Apple would be in the right to sue me for intellectual property violation. If I found them to be using my code outside of the license I provided it to them (and the rest of the world) with, I should be in the right to sue them for intellectual property violation. Is this not correct?

(EDIT: fixed problematic grammar)

Microsoft sued TomTom in 2009 for patent infringement[1]. One aspect of the suit concerned infringement in the implementation of the FAT filesystem in TomTom's Linux-based GPS navigation devices.

The two parties eventually settled[2].

[1] http://arstechnica.com/microsoft/news/2009/02/microsoft-sues...

[2] http://arstechnica.com/microsoft/news/2009/03/microsoft-and-...

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