George Henry wrote:
Perhaps you are unaware that, even after you purchase an SCS Pactor modem,
you must purchase a license to use the Pactor III protocol... and trying to circumvent the licensing requirement is probably illegal just about anywhere in the world, not just in the U.S.
You *have* heard of intellectual property rights, haven't you?
Yes, sure we have!
But in this very particular case the owner of these rights can only enforce them in those countries where they have got granted patents and they are still active/maintained (periodic fees paid to local patent offices).
I am not aware of the list of countries in which they filed their PACTOR III related patents, but since SCS is a relatively small company I would guess they only cover the most important countries, where possible competition could pop-up or where most of the users would be located: e.g. USA & Europe and eventually for strategic reasons Japan, China and very selectively a few more (= cost, cost, cost)...
It should be therefore easy for one of those very talented Russian or Ukranian programmers to write a software PACTOR III modem variant and publish it on a Russian web-server to make it publicly available and this even fully legal in case there is no patent granted in Russia (which I think is quite unlikely that it was filed there)
Then only the people downloading it in the States or Europe (or other patented countries) for instance and starting to use it are infringing the patents (not the programmer/distributor in this case) and SCS could theoretically sue them. (but would become extremely complicated to manage in real life due to various factors)
Actually it would be a very similar story to some of the MP3-Encoders floating around on internet - infringing some German Fraunhofer Institute audio compression patents in many countries.
Sorry for this off-topic posting, but I could not leave the bold IP rights statement of George uncommented, hi !
Oscar, DJ0MY