At 11:27 AM 12/4/00 -0500, 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...
That's legitimate, though it often leads to gray-market rules about smuggling stuff. Many of the Chinese-printed textbooks I saw had covers indicating that they were cookbooks, etc., to conceal that they were pirate editions. Tim writes:
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, you're evil and twisted. Not because you're suggesting ripping off MS, but because you're proposing inflicting that unreliable bloatware on people :-) Thanks! Bill Bill Stewart, bill.stewart@pobox.com PGP Fingerprint D454 E202 CBC8 40BF 3C85 B884 0ABE 4639