By Jo Best, 17 February 2006 14:55
NEWS
Apple has gone all poetic in a warning to would-be software pirates.
User sites have been reporting that the Mac maker has embedded a poem in a file likely to be discovered by software pirates attempting to crack the Mac OS in order to run it on non-Apple hardware.
The poem, found by the OSx86 project, reads:
"Your karma check for today:
There once was a user that whined
His existing OS was so blind
He'd do better to pirate
An OS that ran great
But found his hardware declined.
Please don't steal Mac OS
Really, that's way uncool.
(C) Apple Computer, Inc."
An Apple spokesperson said in a statement that the poem can be found within the Mac operating system: "We can confirm that this text is built into our products. Hopefully it, and many other legal warnings, will remind people that they should not steal Mac OS X."
An earlier exploration of the OS found another file aimed at deterring the pirates named 'Don't Steal Mac OS X'.
Comments
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1. anonymous
Wow, what genius.
Copy protection systems, DRM, fines, jail terms. All rubbish.
All you need is some bad poetry and that will stop people from pirating software.
And it's also cheaper for the software companies as they only need some chimps, typewriters and a suply of bananas.
2. Simon
When is it theft, and when is it "fair use" ?
The SLA for OS X (http://www.apple.com/legal/sla/macosx104.html) says "This License allows you to install and use one copy of the Apple Software on a single Apple-labeled computer at a time."
So that's pretty clear, the licence does not allow you to run the software on a non-Apple computer. But is that clause legally valid ? I guess only a test case could decide that, but where does the vendors rights to control use end, and the consumers rights to use a product as they wish start ?
To my mind, it cannot be considered theft if the end user has paid for a licence to use the software. But it would be theft to use a copy of OS X that hadn't been paid for even if running it on an Apple computer.