At 11:27 AM -0500 12/4/00, David Honig wrote:
At 05:26 AM 12/4/00 -0500, Bill Stewart wrote:
Traditional Chinese copyright law only applied to civilization, i.e. Chinese-language books written by Chinese; stuff written by barbarians wasn't provided, so lots of my Taiwanese fellow students in
college >had much lower-cost versions of US-written textbooks, and that tradition >was adapted to software on CD-ROMs at least until recently.
Maybe so with Chinese, but many publishers publish overseas-only versions of CS texts because the furriners (e.g., Indians) couldn't afford US rates. I've seen legitimately licensed $5 copies of, e.g., K & R printed on thinner paper...
Do you mean you have an independent channel confirming this "legitimate license," or do you mean the rice paper version has carefully reproduced an approval page? Did you check with the copyright holders? (And independent channel would be a letter or even an electronic statement from the copyright holders saying the version was valid. A digitally signed statement would do.) I don't doubt that differential marketing plans will evolve. Selling a CD-ROM of Microsoft Office for $300 US in Bangalore is just not going to fly, not with the back-alley version selling for the rupee equivalent of $5. "The street will find its own uses for technology." And once Mojo gets running, I'm hoping to buy Microsoft Office for 10 Mojobucks. (So I can then resell it to 50 others....) --Tim May -- (This .sig file has not been significantly changed since 1992. As the election debacle unfolds, it is time to prepare a new one. Stay tuned.)