[geeks] Virtualization-supporting Celeron

[Nick B.]

So, can we import some of your politicians to beat up ours, till our copyright
laws become at least semi-sane?  Yours sound downright reasonable!
	Nick
On Tue, Nov 24, 2009 at 11:12:56AM +0200, gsm at mendelson.com wrote:
> On Mon, Nov 23, 2009 at 06:56:24PM -0500, Joshua Boyd wrote:
>
>> Are the keys not legal there?  I know they wouldn't be here, but I'm a
>> little surprised that they wouldn't be there.
>
> That's all very complicated. Israeli copyright law is different than the US.
> It is illegal to SELL copyrighted works without permission, but it is not
> illegal to own or obtain them.
>
> This is because our copyright thieves were much better than most, they were
> able to produce products identical to the original Microsoft ones, down to
> the hollograms and other methods of identifying a genuine product.
>
> In plain English there was no way that a buyer could tell if they were buying
> a legal copy of Windows or not. 
>
> Videotapes were worse, since they were dubbed or subtitled in relatively small
> quantities, the packaging was cheap and poorly done. Sometimes the Russian
> bootlegs were packaged closer to the original than the legal ones.
>
> The same with DVD's, which are often just the movie with no special features.
>
> The remedies in law are limited to actual damages, so if you were caught
> selling 5 copies of Windows at $200 each, the most you could be sued or
> prosecuted for was $1000. 
>
> So as far as I can see, and I am not a lawyer, selling the keys would be
> copyright infringment, if they are copyrighted. Combining them to
> receive signals, would be theft of service, but whom are you stealing them
> from?
>
> If for example, you were to do it with the local cable company (called HOT)
> or the DBS company (called YES) then they could go to the police and file
> a criminal complaint. 
>
> However if you were to do it with signals from outside of the country,
> for example BBC Prime, the BBC would have to do it themselves. Since the BBC
> charges 80 UKP per customer per year for a single user license (and decoder
> card), the most they could go after per person is 80 UKP, and they would have
> to convince a judge (we don't have jury trials here) that it was a deliberate
> theft, not the innocent purchase of a stolen or bootleg product.
>
> If the seller of the keys has 1000 receivers in play, then it becomes 80,000
> UKP and worth it, but so far no one has bothered to do so.
>
> Geoff.
> -- 
> Geoffrey S. Mendelson, Jerusalem, Israel gsm at mendelson.com  N3OWJ/4X1GM
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