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OS X El Capitan License: in Plain English

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121–130 of 132 posts

Re: OS X El Capitan License: in Plain English

#121
post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Does YouTube pay the license fee for YouTube viewer? I would expect so.

That's not the point. With the built-in encoder, people create movies which they make money from. Now, Youtube recodes those when you upload them, however, the "original" movie was created on a Mac. And apparently the license states you can't profit from making H264 videos on OS X. Whether this is something people could actually get sued for is doubtful. On the other hand, I wouldn't be surprised if some shady compan…

I think the MPEG-LA $ license is about distributing encoded videos that the viewer decodes. If YouTube transcodes, you aren't distributing encoded videos to anyone , except maybe YouTube itself, for one play.

But I could be mistaken, I haven't checked carefully.

Re: OS X El Capitan License: in Plain English

#122
post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I always include a "plain english" copy of my contracts when I send them to customers. I state that it's there for reference only, not a substitute for a lawyer on their part, but that I've made the best effort to make it representative of the contract. Most of my client love it, some don't care, but I think it's something that has helped a lot of folks. I think most contracts should have one.

No competent client, or their lawyer, should trust that summary.

No summary or contract is trustworthy, so no, they shouldn't trust it. Trust is between parties, not between papers. It's more of a shortcut and guide. If there's something in the summary that's a red flag, well we just saved a lot of time by finding the matter fast. If not, then we should have a good idea what's in the contract, and if that contract significantly differs from the summary, then the party isn't trustworthy. It's much easier to read a contract with an idea of what it's supposed to say, than going in blind. With the summary, your mind is more focused on "is X true or false" rather than determine what it says, THEN see if the details are kosher.

Re: OS X El Capitan License: in Plain English

#123
post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I always include a "plain english" copy of my contracts when I send them to customers. I state that it's there for reference only, not a substitute for a lawyer on their part, but that I've made the best effort to make it representative of the contract. Most of my client love it, some don't care, but I think it's something that has helped a lot of folks. I think most contracts should have one.

Should there be an intermediary the client needs to sign that the summary isn't a perfect representation of the contract? Kidding, of course. Mostly.

No, because the signatory parties are still responsible for knowing what their signing anyway. If the summary was significantly different than the contents, then one MIGHT have an argument a judge could agree with, but in general, if you sign it, then you better have read it because you agreed to it, summary or no.

Re: OS X El Capitan License: in Plain English

#124
post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I always include a "plain english" copy of my contracts when I send them to customers. I state that it's there for reference only, not a substitute for a lawyer on their part, but that I've made the best effort to make it representative of the contract. Most of my client love it, some don't care, but I think it's something that has helped a lot of folks. I think most contracts should have one.

No competent client, or their lawyer, should trust that summary.

No, but the summary might help avoiding bothering your lawyer if you see there's something you don't like right away in the summary.

I guess that's mostly the point really.

Re: OS X El Capitan License: in Plain English

#125

"I can’t sell access to my Mac via any kind of screen sharing." This one was interesting to me. I thought maybe macminicolo.net might fall foul of this, if they rented out a mac mini to you, but it looks like they instead make you straight-up purchase a mac mini. http://www.macminicolo.net/jvmx_secure_signup.html I wonder if this term/condition was in previous OSX releases and that's why they went this way, or whethe…

http://www.macincloud.com/ is similar, though it seems they rent you a mac per hour, so they're not technically giving you access to their mac: you're accessing the mac you rented.

Re: OS X El Capitan License: in Plain English

#126
post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

X Windows has traumatized me in the past.

it got a lot better. on my archlinux install (on a macbook), the only thing that did not work out of the box was wifi (i had to install proprietary broadcom drivers). other than that, everything is fine and dandy. and it boots a lot faster than osx ever did.

Yup, indeed, running Arch on a 2013 MBA here. It's been a pleasure so far. Installing the broadcom driver was a breeze, and never had any issues.

Re: OS X El Capitan License: in Plain English

#127
post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Judging from the article it does: The author is clearly Apple and they are not responsible just as in the BSD license: The Capitan is AS-IS, of course. Unlike BSD, there is no source and a bunch of other very restrictive limitations, which is what I was commenting about. 1. I can’t use the Capitan with illegal copies of anyone’s stuff. 2. Apple didn’t sell me this software. They still own it, in fact. I’m just borrow…

They place restrictive rights on the usage of the software and retain the ability to revoke your license. BSD does not, ergo it is different.

I'm not sure if this is also true in the US, but the ability to revoke a licence is implicit by law in many places - though the revoker may be liable for any losses caused by the revocation.

Re: OS X El Capitan License: in Plain English

#128
post #73

I did not read anything about installing Windows on Apple hardware and then running OSX Capitan in a virtual machine. Is that really allowed?

This is a question I see pop up every now and then, it was never legal, but I just looked it up again. Unfortunately, no, that's not allowed, your host OS must be an apple supplied OS. See also [1] and here's the excerpt: (iii) to install, use and run up to two (2) additional copies or instances of the Apple Software within virtual operating system environments on each Mac Computer you own or control that is already…

Technically, you can install windows, iTunes, and then an OS X VM. That would seem to comply with the "is already running Apple Software".

Or did I miss something?

Re: OS X El Capitan License: in Plain English

#129

This was both insightful and highlights, i would argue, an unmet need. I would love simple write ups like this for specific software licenses. In theory, tldrlegal.com is positioned to take this on, but in my experience they tend to deal with more pervasive licenses like MIT, GNU, etc.

Tldrlegal seems dead, unfortunately.

Re: OS X El Capitan License: in Plain English

#130

So we're at the point now that legal documents need comments to be human readable. I wonder how long it will be until they look like perl.

One company - http://www.legalese.io/turing.html - is working on this, perhaps inspired by Charles Stross' comments on this idea.

Oh man! I was thinking about the whole legal language should be something of a formal language a little less than a year ago. I'm glad someone is doing something along those lines.
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