Windows XP Licensing for the Apple Boot Camper

On 04/05/2006, edwardpaleo.org (Edward Reid) said:

>
>With respect to software licensing in general, you'll hear a lot of
>comments to the effect that "such-and-such is illegal, you can go to
>jail".
>This results from either misunderstanding or misuse (depending on your
>point of view) of the word "illegal". Violating a software license does
>not
>in general violate any criminal law, and thus will not put you in jail,
>only in danger of civil action from the licensor (which can be a
serious
>danger). The word "illegal" is often used to mean "in violation of the
>license", yet many people think of it as meaning "in violation of
>criminal
>law", hence the confusion. Also, some people simply don't know enough
>about
>the law to realize that violating a contract won't get you into jail.
We
>aren't likely to be able to force people to use just one meaning of the
>word, so the best approach is simply to avoid the words "legal" and
>"illegal" in this context -- as for the most part Glenn did in his
>article.
>

Without the software licence, copying the software is a breach of
copyright. That may be a criminal offence, depending on where you are
located.

Rónán

Edward Reid said:

>With respect to software licensing in general, you'll hear a lot of
>comments to the effect that "such-and-such is illegal, you can go to jail".
>This results from either misunderstanding or misuse (depending on your
>point of view) of the word "illegal". Violating a software license does not
>in general violate any criminal law, and thus will not put you in jail,
>only in danger of civil action from the licensor (which can be a serious
>danger).

It puts you in danger of both. Misappropriating intellectual property
(in this case using software one does not have a license to use) is a
criminal offense:
http://www.usdoj.gov/criminal/cybercrime/iplaws.htm
in addition to giving rise to a civil action by the developer of the
software.

However, as a practical matter, using pirated software, as opposed to
distributing or selling it, isn't a jailable offense.

>The word "illegal" is often used to mean "in violation of the
>license", yet many people think of it as meaning "in violation of criminal
>law", hence the confusion. Also, some people simply don't know enough about
>the law to realize that violating a contract won't get you into jail.

True. Breach of contract isn't a criminal offense usually, unless the
breach involves activities that are also considered criminal in nature.
(Such as violation of the intellectual property laws under the United
States Code.) Indeed (and I've often found this quite frustrating
personally in my practice), in recent years, no matter how egregious the
violation of a contract is, even to the point of the breach amounting to
purposely and severely harming the other party to the contract, one can
just about never get punitive damages in a breach of contract case. Only
actual damages.

>We
>aren't likely to be able to force people to use just one meaning of the
>word, so the best approach is simply to avoid the words "legal" and
>"illegal" in this context -- as for the most part Glenn did in his article.

I don't see any problem with using the term "illegal" or "legal" as long
as there is a known, clearly defined law that one is speaking of. What I
think is more important is that folks understand that not all laws have
jail time as one of the remedies for violating it.

However, even where you can't be jailed for violation of intellectual
property laws, there are some pretty strong remedies available, including
confiscating your computer equipment.
 

_______________________________________________
Randy B. Singer, Attorney at Law

* Moderator of:
  The MacAttorney Computer User Group
* Author of:
  The Macintosh Software Guide for the Law Office
  <http://tinyurl.com/6pyvt>
* Webmaster of:
  The Law Office Software List for the Macintosh Computer
  <http://www.macattorney.com/>
_______________________________________________

It appears, from everything that I've read, that using a copy of XP under boot-camp, and re-installing it on the same machine as many times as you might need (for example on upgrading to OSX 10.5) shouldn't be a problem. Once the bootloader calls XP, it sees the machine just like an ordinary PC - and as long as you don't change the hardware, you may reformat and reinstall XP as many times as you like. The activation wizard will pass activation without any problem, or you may even skip activation using the technique mentioned above.

What seems like it may be more complicated is installing XP on one or more virtual machines running on top of OSX. How the virtual machine emulates the hardware or passes information about the hardware on to the activation code will affect whether it sees a valid installation of XP or not. Significant changes in the virtual machine software could make re-activating XP difficult. It seems to me to be a little more risky to go the virtualization route while these issues are still being sorted out.

And then, what if you want to install XP in both dual-boot and virtual modes on a Mac? I've heard anecdotally that if you call and explain to the agent, they'll activate it for you. But I've also heard that it's explicitly against their policy.

I've had some luck with running XP under Virtual-PC, though - once I installed it and had a working virtual machine, I archived a copy of that machine's HD image - then whenever I need to re-create a VPC copy of XP, I just make a copy of the HD image. No reinstalling, no activation. That's quite convenient - so if you need several similar virtual machines, that's one way to go.

B

>
> And then, what if you want to install XP in both dual-boot and virtual
> modes on a Mac? I've heard anecdotally that if you call and explain to
> the agent, they'll activate it for you. But I've also heard that it's
> explicitly against their policy.
>
Because now you're getting into an area where there's very little
consensus in the vendor community about how to proceed. Running multiple
virtualized machines with multiple copies of an OS or application like
Oracle on a dual core CPU brings up all kinds of issues which software
licenses worth millions of $ in revenue don't address very well at this
time. And the vendor interpretations of how they want to be paid has
been a moving target for several years now.

No one wants to set a precedent involving a few dollars which can cost
them millions later.