Software Liscence agreement

[bergie007]

A few of my freinds want to start a "software pool" to purchase expensive games for their LAN. They asked me about some of the liscencing issues. Heres the thing:

If one user buys a software package (lets use Quake 3 as an example) and gives it to all his friends to use and copy at will etc, he is breaking the liscence agreement and the law. But what happens when 5 users pool money together evenly and buy Q3. Who gets to use it and hoe does the liscencing work then?

This may seem impossible but here in South Africa the Rand/Dollar exchange has made games unaffordable to "regular" gamers such as my friends.

What do they do?

 

[SkyHook]

Sorry

The reality is no matter how the money is splitup, you are still only purchasing ONE license for one user. The software developers don't care how you come by the funds to purchase a product they only recognise how many licenses you purchase. One license=One user.

Not what you wanted to hear but that is the way it works.

 

[The Modfather]

The way it works @ my company is like this:

We purchase the media and put it on the network. If we are unable to purchase an "enterprise" license, then we have to buy them for each machine that the software is installed on.

Also, it is my understanding that we could theoritically install the software on as many PC's as we wanted to, but legally we could only have as many copies running as we held licenses for. For example, Visio 2000 - if we hold 10 licenses, but install it on 15 machines, we can only legally run 10 copies simultaneously.

I am not sure how it works w/ game software and the likes....