At 7:31 AM -0700 7/24/96, Anonymous wrote:

Jeff Weinstein wrote:

...

I'm also curious why these anonymous crusaders did not act sooner? The US version has been available for sale in retail outlets for about a year now. Was it not worth $50 to make your point?

If you look real carefully at ftp://utopia.hacktic.nl/pub/replay /pub/incoming you'll notice that the "commercial" 2.01 for Win32 has actually been uploaded.

The reason that is was not done sooner is probably that it felt more like stealing to upload software that Netscape expected you to pay for. Now that Netscape is finally giving away strong crypto versions to anybody who asks for it (and claims to be an American) it isn't really stealing in the same sense anymore. It's just ITAR we're ignoring, not Netscape's commercial interests.

The above statement is false. You have to agree to the license for the beta, and the release will likely have the same terms as before--you have to buy it unless you're a US student or some such. Netscape is NOT "giving it away". Even the no-charge users are licensed under carefully crafted terms. And as the copyright owner, they, not you decide on redistribution policy even for cases where it is a no-charge copy. So it IS stealing to redistribute without permission--it is THEIR intellectual property and only they may decide on what terms others may have a copy. And yes, I'm a licensed user and paid for mine. David