On 9 Mar 99, at 23:51, Dale Laluk wrote:

> Hi,
>
> I am the sysop for a small ISP (140 Users) in a very remote Northern
> Canada town. Our system consists of a 19.2K outbound connection and a
> 400 Kbps inbound connection via satellite. In order to better help
> our subscribers we have toyed with the idea of keeping a local copy
> of Netscape 4.5, Internet Explorer, Outlook Express, Etc. on our
> local web server so that people can download directly from our local
> server, versus over the satellite link that sometimes has problems
> with the larger downloads. The smart download things don't reliably
> work through the satellite.
>
> What are the legal ramifications of this ? I figure the software is
> free of the internet any how, so what if we stock pile it. The lic.
> agreement is still agreed to/or not when installing the program. One
> of our directors is concerned that usually you have to take a cookie
> to get the software, and that is the "cost" if you will. Then again I
> know colleges,etc. that download it once and then through their LAN
> install the software many times. Thoughts ???

  As I recall, one of the ways that Microsoft ramped up market share
for IE was that they were willing to co-operate with ISPs on this, in
days when Netscape was still trying to get non-edu users to pay for
their browser.  My impression is that they're both now willing to make
such arrangements -- ask them.
  The two areas I can see where they might have an issue is making sure
that (a) your users have access to their latest revisions, and (b) that
if you provide versions with 128-bit security, these cannot be
downloaded from outside Canada and USA (i.e., should only be available
from your machine to your own customers).

David G

             Do you want to signoff PCSOFT or just change to
                    Digest mode - visit our web site:
                    http://nospin.com/pc/pcsoft.html