Microsoft sues Comet over OS disk sales
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If MS persist in this then the Comet brand and all their stores will disappear. Jobs will be lost, galore. Yes, Comet may have been wrong in the spirit of the law - but as some previous posters have said, they were only including recovery type disks for buyers of computers.
Sometimes pursuit of a legal point becomes futile. This is one such case.
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Ignorance of the law is no excuse, and does not absolve one of the consequences of breaking such law (especially in business, where it ALWAYS pays to "measure twice and cut once", to borrow a carpentry euphemism). They should very well have known doing this was illegal (and if they didn't, they're either stupid or lying - or both), and did it anyway, and many tens of thousands of times. If they wanted to be helpful, it would have been very easy to do the right and legal thing and pass the customer on to the OEM to acquire recovery media if that customer so desired. It would still have been perfectly legal, would have still made the customer happy, and likely would have kept this whole thing from happening. Neither hubris nor ignorance should shield one from consequences of violation of the law, and this isn't one of those "obscure" ones either, honestly.
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..or provided a packet explaining how a user can (legally) make their own recovery disks.
Comet simply broke the law by making and selling copies of copyrighted material without the authors' permission.
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And the upshot is... on the brink of bankruptcy... Microsoft send in their legal rottweillers... great tactics... and whatever happened to mediation? This is a no win, no win, situation for all parties...
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Hi everyone
Motto for 2012
Hey, hey, everyone still Okay
How many Lawyers can we screw up today.
This type of case is totally pointless and futile whatever the "legal Merits".
Comet in NO WAY was attempting to steal or Pirate MS'es intellectual property rights -- these CD's still need a valid serial number for re-installation of the OS.
In other words you need a proper Windows License which is usually found on a sticker on the bottom of the PC sold in the store.
If Comet go under even MS itself will have lost revenue as Comet sells quite a few PC's (with W7 installed on it) and a number of other MS products too.
If I were to see a US Lawyer crossing the street my Car wouldd experience a sudden case of brake failure.
Cheers
jimbo
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Hi everyone
This type of case is totally pointless and futile whatever the "legal Merits".
Comet in NO WAY was attempting to steal or Pirate MS'es intellectual property rights -- these CD's still need a valid serial number for re-installation of the OS.
In other words you need a proper Windows License which is usually found on a sticker on the bottom of the PC sold in the store.
Yes legally you have to have the COA sticker to match the OS your installing but if you use the recovery media made for your specific brand of PC, you don't need to actually enter a product code during the install. The recovery media restores the OS without asking for one. And I believe it will use SLP activation too. Thats probably the sticky point with Microsoft. You need a certificate file for that to work and they give that out to the OEM's. At least thats the way I understand it from what I've read on Wikipedia. I think Comet is screwed however you look at it.
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Bah to the OEMs - no Recovery disk = no sale. But don't they now provide a "Recovery partition"? Is that not as good?
What would happen if, as part of the sale process, Comet showed the customer how to make a Recovery disk, there and then?
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What would happen if, as part of the sale process, Comet showed the customer how to make a Recovery disk, there and then?
I suggested that earlier but, thinking about it, I doubt that Comet as a general electrical retailer would have any staff who knew how to do that in most of their stores.
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The recovery partition is only good if you actually use the utility to make a set of recovery "disks" before something bad happens. If you hard drive gets messed up you may not be able to actually access the recovery mode. Screw the recovery media, I'd rather have real install media with no bloatware on it.
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Bah to the OEMs - no Recovery disk = no sale. But don't they now provide a "Recovery partition"? Is that not as good?
Well as others have said, if the hard drive goes south you're pretty buggered.
What is less well known however, is that in many cases the recovery partition is actually linked to the default Windows 7 Recovery Environment.
In other words, if your boot manager goes south then your buggered. To make matters worse many OEM's (Toshiba in particular, from first hand experience, although I've spoken to quite a few people who say other OEM's do the same thing) "recovery disks" won't install without the OEM's boot manager.
As an example, I had a Toshiba Windows 7 laptop with a corrupted BCD. The recovery partition was inaccessible, but thankfully the person I was fixing it for had the original installation media. (Was actually supplied with the laptop for once.) I stuck the disk in, and it got stuck at "Loading Setup" because it couldn't find the BCD. Once I stuck my retail Ultimate disk in, with a removed ei.cfg it worked fine.
I'm not saying that recovery partitions don't have their place, I actually use a custom made one myself so I don't have to find the disk most of the time, but linking them into the bootmanager is just stupid and or delibaretly milking customers for support fees depending on your point of view.
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