Copyrant General IP Issues6/8/2000; 7:42:30 AM Lookee lookee, Slashdot's starting to wake up a little and come out of script-kiddie law land (or Katz law land, only slightly more sensible). The comments on the article are still atrociously ignorant, but the article itself isn't half bad... just too long. (This coming from the king of "too long".)"If you buy a car, you are almost certainly protected by state 'lemon laws'. They were enacted to prevent the abuses that were extremely common, and so you acquired certain minimum rights in the purchase transaction which cannot be waived: if the car breaks down all the time, you can return it and get a refund plus your expenses paid. No matter what the sales contract says. . . We haven't got anything of the sort with software purchases."And this is as much as I really want to say about the Microsoft decision... I had hoped that Microsoft's fear of being broken up would have given it an incentive to not pull the stunts referred to in this Slashdot article. If I own a license to a piece of software and my hard drive wipes out, I expect to be able to re-install. I think that behavior will look an awful lot like something only a monopoly could hope to get away with in the consumer market. (It might make a certain amount of sense on the corporate side, but not for home users.)