You could go to jail too. Especially if you haven't read your AutoCAD EULA recently.
This case really gives me mixed feelings. I was an AutoCAD reseller for many years, and was a participant in Autodesk's antipiracy program. Sandy Boulton, who even today still runs the program, used to really like me, because I'd occasionally find folks who were blatently pirating multiple copies of AutoCAD -- running their whole offices on AutoCAD without having paid for one copy. Autodesk has collected over $63 million in piracy fines in the USA alone, and I helped with a little bit of that.
Even today, I occasionally send leads to Sandy. For example, I just found a person selling AutoCAD, Inventor, SolidWorks, MatLab, Ansys, and MSC.Patran on eBay. Given the context, it was pretty obvious that it was blatent piracy. And, yes, he'll be hearing from some of these companies, because I "turned him in."
The man who will be spending 9 months in jail was similarly egregious in his piracy. But there are less equally egregious cases of piracy where people haven't had to face the prospect of jail.
The question I have is where do we draw the line? Should a person who gives copies of his AutoCAD to his friends go to jail too? What if he charges his friends for it, to offset his costs?
I asked Sandy Boulton about this, and she clarified the situation a bit:
"There are two avenues for pursuit -- civil and criminal. The person that is violating our license agreement, is subject to civil remedies; the individual selling our software for profit is subject to criminal remedies. The guy we just went after criminally, was selling our software."
It seems clear on the surface, but I'm unconvinced. AutoCAD is almost always used in a commercial context -- so there is aways a "profit" component in piracy.
In any case of piracy, whether it falls under civil or criminal law, the liability comes from violating the owner's copyright -- or, more explicitly, violating the terms of the end-user license agreement (EULA.)
The AutoCAD EULA is mighty easy to violate -- even inadvertantly. For example, a few years ago, I went on a business trip out of country, with a copy of AutoCAD on my computer. Thank goodness I didn't actually use that copy of AutoCAD when I was overseas -- because if I had, my license to the software would have automatically and immediately expired. Similarly, I loaned my computer to a friend when we were at an industry conference. It had a copy of AutoCAD on it. Did I violate the EULA?
Autodesk doesn't generally post its EULAs on its website (despite recent case law in California that says customers have a right to read the EULA before paying for the software.) However, I managed to find a copy of the AutoCAD EULA on the 2006 streaming trial page. I copied it to my blog, and you can find it at [http://autocomment.typepad.com] .
(I also looked for the CATIA and Pro/E EULAs online, and couldn't find them. I have a well-founded suspicion that they're even more restrictive than Autodesk's. Fortunately, though, I don't have copies of Pro/E or CATIA on my computer.)
I've asked Autodesk for clarification on some of the terms in the AutoCAD EULA, but they've so far failed to respond. Considering the potential penalty for violating the AutoCAD EULA, that makes me just a little nervous.
