amicus_curious wrote:
Was anyone ever prosecuted over such a silly situation?
I don't know if there were prosecutions, but the publishing industry
very much wanted this law enforced - it was the equivalent of DVD
region coding for books. Publishers wanted control over how books
were published here and didn't want sellers doing an end run around
them and importing the same books from other countries.
Here's a story where similar laws in the EU may have affected Amazon:
<http://www.theregister.co.uk/2004/01/07/bpi_down_plays_amazon_com/>
You are off the mark anyway. The discussion here was about the effects
> of the EULA for a commercial product versus the GPL. Pay more attention
> to context.
I did. You said:
> That is what is different about the GPL, I think, namely that the end
> user
> arrives at the same endpoint condition and the copyright owner is in the
> same condition regardless of the way that the software is conveyed. If
> there were a black box connecting the copyright owner to the end user,
> you
> could not ever say just what was in the box, only that some mechanism
> existed for conveying the software from the owner to the user.
>
> After conveying the license to use the software to the end user, the GPL
> goes on and on about what is allowed to be in the black box. I don't
> think
> that the courts really care.
And I pointed out that in fact, how an end user gets his copy can matter.