RDK, What if I have not created the original data despite my ownership of it? Say I contracted a company to create a database of materials on products I used in 1985.
I used this database for 5 years at which time I switched to windows and constructed a new database as most of our material had changed anyway.
Now in 2005, a customer needs to know what product he was shipped and the info is in that database. I no longer own or can even purchase an IBM XT or whatever used to run the DOS software and it is incompatible with all current windows platforms DOS modes (this can happen)
Now the company that provided the software originally is bankrupt, gone, kaput, but they did produce a Win 3.1 Version that I can get to run on a machine. Trouble is we never bought that version, and can't now as the company is gone.
I would technically have to steal/copy the software to access my data. But is it stealing or piracy if the owner of the intellectual property has abandoned their stake in it.
Patents can expire, is it possible for intellectual property ownership to expire? Or is it left as patents are to the owner to defend ownership? Ie if I do nothing to prevent use of my IP then I'm effectively giving up ownership.
Good business practices would have been to have the data is a source that you could access.
Most commercial software uses available data formats that are readable and well known. Even custom data bases uses the same commercial data base engines and formats. (I may have used software terms incorrectly, I’m civil not computer.)
The bottom line is that most data is available somehow through other some means.
Have you truly exhausted all avenues to get your data other than to run illegal software?
Have you contacted the current owners of the software, it would have been an asset in the bankruptcy proceedings to see if you can acquire a license or at least permission to use the software?
Copyrights can expire but that will not happen on any software that would still have useful data for a long time (50 years after the death of the author I believe.)
Have you contacted the software community to see if someone can write a conversion program to get the data? Somebody at
Have you reviewed all paper records of the past work to see if the answer exists in paper?
Sorry Slowzuki but all you have done is rationalized theft, not made a case of some compelling interest to use the illegal software.
I’ll agree that theft is the easiest way out of this situation and that it is low risk theft in that not only is it difficult to catch software thieves but in the case you outlined there would not even be anyone looking for that crime.
But it is still theft.
Rick Kitson MBA P.Eng
Construction Project Management
From conception to completion
I remember a case of some sort several years back where someone was prosecuted for a crime based on evidence found in their trash can - the one put out to the street for collection. The defendent claimed that it was an illegal search of his property. The courts ruled that by putting the stuff out to the trash, he had relinquished a claim to it, so there was no crime committed in taking it.
Obviously, this does not affect copyright law, but I think it does bear on a discussion of the ethics of this situation.
Edward L. Klein
Pipe Stress Engineer
Houston, Texas
"All the world is a Spring"
All opinions expressed here are my own and not my company's.
Theft by definition involves a victim, in this case the copyright holder. If all reasonable means have been taken to find and compensate the present copyright holder have been taken without luck, I see no crime in using the IP. In Slowzuki's case, the next step might be to contact the bankruptcy court to see where that particular asset went.
I must confess that I am potentially guilty of, or at least complacent in, violating software property rights. After reading the ethical reasoning in this thread have forced me to evaluate my responsibility, and have decided to attempt bringing the company I work for into compliance (as I am in a position of doing so).
One central question posed in this thread is whether it is right to stay with an employer that uses illegal software? If I were to leave immediately, the company would remain using pirated software, and if I stay I can probably help prevent patent infringement! (To use an absurdity; am I driving a car, stolen by a friend, until I can afford my own?)
However, while both wrong, I do not think that equating software piracy with common theft is intellectually honest. If someone worked at a company where software rights were violated, that person should attempt within his realm of influence to change policy, or potentially seek other employment. (A man who poaches on the king's property to feed his family is committing a crime, but still making a wise decision as long as he intends on ceasing the hunt when other food sources are available.) If an employee fails to change policy after informing management, he still has to earn a living, and his waiting it out in the current climate might be the right choice.
I certainly agree good business practice can remedy most situations. I wouldn't yet call my actions or theoretical actions rationialized theft.
To take another angle, many software packages include a comment in the licence preventing the reverse engineering of the software or the data produced. If the company folds and is not purchased by another company, am I in the right hiring another company to extract my data from their software?
If so, I would be extremely leary of any company offering services hosted on their own servers. I would also be very leary of the wording included on many software packages now claiming to only offer the lease of the software or seat for a specific duration revokable at any time.
This type of arrangement is ripe for abuse by the manufacturer of the software.
We as engineers are prevented from doing anything like this with our IP, imagine if we could revoke a design of a building (or set an expiry date) and required the owners to have a new set of plans and calcs prepared before it could be occupied again. This would of course put the original creator of the design in a much better position than the rest of the market.
I have taken enough business courses that I feel that many companies lean heavily (to the point of abusing?) on the IP rights to leverage their market position instead of striving to produce a competitive product. I suppose this is why some software companies making a lot of money doing this have received some slaps on the wrist.
So when a company leveraging this IP right goes under and no one buys their rights to a product and it is trashed when the bankruptcy is settled, is it still stealing?
I'll have to start reading some of these license agreements we all click on without reading!
Sorry StressGuy, I really do not see any parallel.
Yes your trash on the street is fair game, that’s why I have a shredder for all important trash.
How does this affect the software copyright issue? If they threw out copies of the software they never threw out the license only the media it was printed on. Read a typical EUL agreement, all you are buying is the disks and manuals and a license to use the software in accordance with that agreement.)
Your example is more line saying that if a record company threw out a copy of a music CD that they were relinquishing all claim to the rights of that music and that it was free to copy and distribute.
Copyrights can lapse. In Canada Aspirin is still a trademark of Bayer. In the US it is a generic name for ASA. The copyright was stripped in the US under trading with the enemy laws. Linoleum is now a generic product, it once was a trade name for a specific brand of floor covering and its trademark lapsed due to the company allowing it to fall into common use.
Similarly copyrights lapse after some period of time. Thus the works of Shakespeare and Dickens are now public domain.
However the passage of time is not sufficient to let anything in the computer world lapse into the public domain.
The only way that the software could become public domain was if the owner did not protect its rights be allowing illegal copying of the software. This is similar to squatter’s rights in real estate law. If you allow public free access across your property then sooner or later you lose the ability to stop that access. (The CPR has a private crossing near by that they allow the public to use. Once a year they block access for 24 hours to maintain their rights to the property and to allow them to close the crossing if they want.)
Rick Kitson MBA P.Eng
Construction Project Management
From conception to completion
I would take a look at why the company was using pirated software in the first place.
Was it a decision of management to do so or was it the well intentioned but misguided actions of some lower ranking employees that allowed the software to be installed.
If the company’s senior management made a decision to use illegal software then that would bode ill for the ethical nature of the people and the company’s ethos in general. That sort of company I would leave fairly quickly since there is seldom honour among thieves.
If it was the misguided but well meant actions of a few lower individuals then I’d embark on an educational campaign to inform them of the nature of their acts and make an attempt to clean up things as much as possible.
Rick Kitson MBA P.Eng
Construction Project Management
From conception to completion
I'll disagree a bit with RDK. Management has the ultimate responsibility for ensuring that all their employees behave ethically.
In the "few bad apples" case, one has to at least question the competence, if not the integrity, of a management structure that reaps the benefits of pirated software, yet never questions how they are able to spend zero dollars on software maintenance every year. The "see no evil" approach in management is bogus. At best, they are incompetent. At worst, they are simply turning the blind eye to hide behind a plausible deniability defense.
Whenever possible, you should use open document formats to store your critical information. When you update your platform, you have the option of porting the application to it, or getting someone to write code to import your data to your new software. This is feasible due to your access to the source code, and legal and ethical due to the unrestrictive GNU copyright.
If you are preparing text documents, you would be surprised at how easy it is to write HTML code with a text editor like NOTEPAD. Under theses conditions, HTML is an open format, and you know how it works.
If you store your critical data in a proprietary format, you are not completely in control of it.
"If the company no longer exists, how can it protect its copyright?"
In bankruptcy, assets go to the creditors. It is then up to the creditor (new copyright owner) to protect its rights. If the copyright holder dies, the copyright is inherited.
If I own a car, I may elect to not sell or rent it at any price. It remains useful to me as a car. But a copyright is only useful if it is licensed out or sold. If payment is tendered and refused for some old program, is there really an ethical or legal obligation to not use it?
Yes there is an obligation not to use software that you do not own.
If I offered to buy your car and you refused to sell it to me would I be justified in stealing it?
The owner of the copyright has the right to refuse to sell it to you.
You then do not have the right to steal it.
Bottom line keep your data in a format that will allow you to access it in the future. That means open source data formats, converting data or keeping paper copies.
Just because stealing the software is the easiest way to access your data does not give you the right to steal it.
Rick Kitson MBA P.Eng
Construction Project Management
From conception to completion
stevenal is getting closer to what I'm concerned about. In Canada a corperation is almost the same as a ficticious person for property rights and many other things.
If a corperation winds up and the creditors don't want some of the assets then they are disposed of. A recent case locally included a software company and a small bank. The company defaulted on its 6 million dollar loan with the bank with physical assets of about 15 cents on the dollar.
The companies assets were all software that required intensive marketing and support to recover any value and also required staff involved in their creation for maintenance.
None of the guarateed creditors where interested and none of the remaining creditors including former employees were interested enough to exchange the software for even part of their salary owed. The bank allowed the computer on which the source code was stored to be formated before auction losing the 6 million dollar investment.
So now about a dozen clients in North America have copies of the software which is end of lined. No one retains the source code (except one employee who stole the code earlier before being fired but that is separate) and no one claims ownership. The clients agreement says they will rely on company X for any upgrades / changes but company X does not exist and their product was not purchased by anyone. The company name was not even purchased by competitors.
Can they update their own code? Yes it has to be reverse engineered with having the source code. None would likely do it due to cost but do they have a right to?
The bank now owns the copyright to the source code. It’s that simple. They acquired it with all the other assets during the bankruptcy and even if they don’t want to sell it or support it they still have those rights. If you were a licensed holder of a legal copy you still can use the software in accordance with the terms of the license.
Ask the bank or offer to buy the source code rights. I’m sure that the bank would say license the rights to the collective owners for some amount. It may even be a token amount. However if they don’t want to sell it to you, you cannot justifying stealing it.
If I owned a GM car and they went bankrupt would that entitle me to steal parts from the creditors?
Same thing except we are talking about intellectual property instead of physical property.
So far all I have heard here is that theft is allowable if you will not get caught and it’s the most economical option.
If you are using propitiatory software then make sure that your data can be converted to some open source or other common long term commercially available software data engine. That’s simply good business practices.
That way if your supplier goes bankrupt you will not feel justified in resorting to theft to have access to your data.
I have a problem with why some people feel that just because they will not get caught that this theft is justified.
If your design was going to be used to build another building somewhere where you would never know that the building was being built would the person be justified in re-using your design? No different for software.
Rick Kitson MBA P.Eng
Construction Project Management
From conception to completion
The difference between the car and the software copyright is that the car is useful in itself. If the bank refuses to negotiate for the source code rights in the scenario above, the copyright has lost all value. It has been abandoned like the trash Stressguy mentioned, and there is no victim for theft to occur. My opinion here, seems the law may not agree. Not all laws are just.
So if a bank foreclosed on a car and refused to negotiate selling or renting it to you, you would be justified in stealing it?
Whether or not the bank in using the car or not is irrelevant.
Whether or not the previous owner had rented the car to someone else who gave you a ride in it is also irrelevant
That is exactly analogous to the issue about using a pirate copy of software that belonged to a now bankrupt company.
The bank may not want to negotiate licensing it to you or not. It is their property and theirs to do with as they see fit. Same as if they had forclosed on a car.
Just because you had someone else enter data through the software once, similar to being given a ride in the car, you have no further rights.
Al this discussion is doing is trying to justify stealing something simply because it is the easiest and quickest way out of a problem created by your own lack of due diligence in protecting your data by having it is a format that would be accessible to you long after the original software company went bankrupt.
We are engineers. That means two things in this discussion. The first is that we should be able to plan ahead and foresee the possible problems that may occur and take the necessary actions to avoid or at least mitigate those problems. Bankrupt software companies is a possibility just the same as the 1:100 year storm is a possibility in a building design.
The second is that we are professionals and bound by a code of ethics to obey the lay and not to steal items of value just because it is the easiest way out of our own predicament.
Remember our fellow engineers created this software and they are entitled to fair compensation for their work. If you can not find them to pay them for their work then do without it, don’t steal it.
Rick Kitson MBA P.Eng
Construction Project Management
From conception to completion
Another way to view it is that you left a CD in a car that has been deemed unfit to drive on the public highway and impounded. Should you steal the car from the impound (ignoring any safety issues - its only an analogy!) so you can drive round listening to your music, should you break into the car and retrieve your CD so that you can acquire another car to drive round in listening to your music or should you just accept that that music is lost forever because you didn't take steps to remove the CD before the car got so bad it couldn't be driven again.
I think my view is somewhere around the middle option when we are talking about a software company going bankrupt but the discussion has certainly got me thinking.
To take the analogy a bit further - suppose you had left something in someone else's car, by mistake, and then shortly after it was foreclosed on? Wouldn't you be justified in obtaining access to the vehicle to reclaim the item? Isn't this the same as accessing the software to retrieve data? If the software is loaded, the data retrieved (over which you have copyright!), and then the software is unloaded again, is this unethical, in the case where you have made due diligence to obtain legal rights to use the software, but have been unable to do so?
It's all very well to say that the data should have been taken out first, but it seems that in the above case, the data that was thought to be required was taken out, and it only came to light at a later data that additional data was required, and not copied across.
Having said all the above - someone must have the licence for this software, otherwise how else could you get a copy? If so, it may be possible for the licence holder to retrieve this information for you (akin to asking for the item left in the car to be returned to you, instead of asking for access to the car to retrieve the item).
