Some respondents to my blog about Apple's Quicktime seem to have missed the point:  Windows without QT opens .tifs and allows you to save them; it will not save them with QT loaded, unless you pay extra as prompted or (if you know how) you have unchecked the file association.

Retrying this exercise today I discovered that if you change the file association within the QT control panel, the software simply switches it back again. Only by changing the association from within Windows (My Computer> Tools> Options> File Types) could I persuade the machine not to open .tifs using QT.

I do not suggest deliberate fraud in this attempt to get you to pay for functionality QT has itself disabled, and it may even be a bug - the software appears to be under the impression that a .tif  is a movie.

I would however point out that more than one TV company in Britain has recently got into trouble for phone-in competitions for which people were allowed to enter after the result had been decided, at some small cost to themselves and considerable profit to the companies involved.

Again there was no suggestion of deliberate fraud; but the courts took the view that mistakes providing profit to the perpetrators should not have happened, and stemmed from institutional laxity resulting in a breach of public trust. 

The overaggressive marketing of QT Pro is similar in principle if not in scale, constituting a breach of trust that happens to be potentially profitable to Apple. At the very least the QT installation and screen prompts should have made clear that changing file associations might disable some functionality and that, as an alternative to buying QT Pro, users could try giving .tifs back to Windows which will happily save them for free.

To answer another of my flamers: my comments were not anti-American; they were my perception of cultural differences. Pretending there are none is not going to bring nations together.  You would, for instance, have to recognise that most French people speak French before you could even speak to them.

Western Europeans tend to be more suspicious of big business than Americans, partly because there is a stronger left-wing tradition here, and perhaps also because so many big companies are American and we fear being swamped. To take another glaring difference: there would probably be riots in the US if strict gun controls were imposed; in London there would probably be riots (well, noisy demonstrations) if they were lifted.

Looking at the figures for gun deaths in the US, I think the attitudes of many of its good citizens towards gun control are crazy; but it's their funeral (literally, in many cases) and I don't hold it against them so long as they don't point the wretched things at me.