On Wed, 12 Jul 2006 23:12:20 -0400, "J. Mc Laughlin"
wrote:


Absent a specific contract to the contrary, one who legally purchases a
copyrighted work may sell it, destroy it, read it if it can be read, and run
it on a computer if it is software. Such a lawful copy may be used to
facilitate the crafting of another work (such as using WordPerfect to write
a letter) or may be used to facilitate the fabrication of useful articles
(such as the use of EZNEC to design an antenna that is improved in some
way).

Mac, I am not sure of you meaning of a "specific contract".

It is often the case that we acquire software (being a copyright work)
under a licence that is an agreement between the licensor and the
licensee.

The agreement may be in the form of a general license, for instance an
end user licence that the user is deemed to have accepted in using the
software, or it could be in the form of a specific formal agreement
executed by the parties.

That agreement may limit the licensee's rights, including the purpose
for which software is used.

I give an example, the BestOne mainframe performance evaluation suite
licence limited it use to execution a specific computer and explicitly
only for analysis of performance data collected from that computer.

Isn't the license agreement like any contract in that the parties can
agree to anything lawful.

It seems to me that one has to read the relevant licence agreement to
form a view on what is or isn't permitted by the licence in addition
to any rights under copyright statutes.

Owen
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