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What happens when you purchase a
specific software
application?
And if you’ve purchased software,
what is the license agreement for? Do you now own
the software
because you paid for it?*
Simply put, no. Though you may have
paid for the software,
what you have actually done is licensed the application,
essentially paying for the rights to use the software
according to guidelines determined by the owner. The
owner of the software
remains the person or entity that holds the
copyright, giving them the sole legal authority
power to sell, distribute, copy and/or change the
content of the software.
And unless the person or organization transfers
ownership rights, the rights remain with the owner
no matter how many times the owner legally
distributes the software.
When a user either purchases software
or freely downloads
software
from the Internet,
the user is not buying the ownership rights to the software
but a license to use the software
according to the licensing agreement, or EULA
(for end user licensing agreement). The EULA
is a legal agreement between the two parties and is
legally actionable if either party violates the
terms of the agreement. While no two EULAs
are exactly the same, a typical EULA,
whether it comes in the boxed software
from your local computer
store or attached to an Internet
download
of an application,
states that the person or organization licensing the
software
is granted permission to use the software
and almost nothing else. This ensures that the software
cannot be copied and sold by anyone, nor can the
fundamental programming
of the software
be changed to alter the performance of the application.
The licensing agreement also protects the end user
from any legal liabilities incurred by the owner of
the software's
copyright. Typically, software
that can be used by both individuals and
organizations have different licensing agreements
that cover different issues (e.g., the EULA
for software
being distributed to an enterprise will specify how
many individual workstations
the software
can be deployed on).
It’s a good idea to actually read
all the way through the licensing agreements of software
you buy or download.
One way that spyware has been able to proliferate
over the Internet
is by individuals not paying attention to the
licensing agreements that state that along with the
intended software
the program
will also be installing spyware
on your system.
*It
should be noted that the software
referred to herein is proprietary software,
not open
source software,
which follows its own set of rules. |