Can the hillsborough school board charge a school millions of dollars playing uneducated games???

Question

Ok. Has any1 heard of a game called halo trial??? Well, in my schools computerlabs I have the trial/folder in all of the computers on the desktop...and this school district teacher said that the school can get charged millions or thousands of dollars because the school doesn't have a liscense to play those type of games. But the thing is, I didn't install it with a cd. I just took it from my flash drive and dragged it to the desktop. Is this true guys??? Can the school really get charged money?? please help!!! Thanks.

Answer 1

In theory, yes - most software licenses (all that legalese you probably just click 'I agree' to get past while installing) specifies the software is only legal for installation to one computer. When you copy it to another, that's bootlegging and the school could be held accountable if the software maker found out and wanted to make an issue of it. Now, being that this is a trial version, the license may be more liberal - without looking thru (and trying to translate Lawyer into English), no way to be sure if there's a legal threat or not. Bottom line however is, they are the school's computers, not yours so they have last say what gets installed and what doesn't.

Answer 2

Most educational computer labs receive massive discounts on hardware and software because they are going to be used 'for educational purpose only'.

I think what the teacher is trying to say is that if it's discovered that they are allowing the hardware/software to be used for non-educational purposes, then they would lose their ability to get the big discounts.

So, yeah... I think it's entirely possible that if they don't enforce a zero-tolerance policy on games that aren't approved as educational, then they could be giving up millions of dollars in discounts.