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U.S. Court Ruling Nixes EULA Sales Restrictions
Raziel writes: "The Register is reporting in this article that a district court has ruled in favour of "software users that wish to extricate themselves from restrictive software licenses". The case in question is Adobe vs Softman, and in its ruling, the District of California seems to vacate Adobe's claims of "irrepairable damage" caused by the resale of Adobe products without forcing the use of Adobe's registration process. The full ruling is available in PDF format here. Any chance of a precedent here?" You can also read the Don Marti piece piece that sparked this discussion.
Does this decision have any impact on upgrading software and getting price breaks?
For example, I upgrade from Crapsoft 3.1 by buying Crapsoft 4.0 and get a rebate on Crapsoft 4.0 because I have a 3.1 UPC symbol.
So can I sell Crapsoft 3.1 to someone because I am no longer using it and I made two purchases and am only using one?
Jesus saves....And takes 1/2 damage.
The article and ruling are worded such that the ruling only applies to unused software. IE you can't decide a week after using XP that you don't like it and sell it (If the EULA doesn't permit that) But if you never installed it you are fine.
What if the software is installed by default. Software that has a clickthrough or registration screen built in on first use will probably still be covered, but other stuff may not be.
Take Dell and Compaq, the kings of bundled software crap, either one of two things will happen: all software will be installed with no CD for backup or it will become like the distros of the OS, where the installer can only be used on "your computer".
I got in trouble for donating 500 licences of MS Office 98, and MS windows that had been bundled with our machines when we changed to all open source. Apparently the IRS does not consider donation of microsoft software as a charitable contributuion of any value.
In the non-bundled reatil world, hasn't this been happening a EB and Software etc. for ages? I would beat a game, trade it for a little cash or a credit at the store. I guess when you do this online there is no way to know weather the software is on the original media or not.
"Get them before they get....
And here's how:
Person A downloads the GPLed software, makes whatever changes he wants to. He sells this software to Person B, along with the full source code; thus he is complying with the GPL. He doesn't have to give the source code to anyone but person B, because he's not distributing binaries to anyone but person B.
Person B then resells each copy of the software, without source code. He is not complying with the GPL, but that's okay, because he didn't agree to it. He is just exercising first sale rights that copyright law gives him.
The end result? Both people make money, both are obeying the law... but the spirit of the GPL gets raped.
I am (obviously) not a lawyer, but it seems like a legitimate scam to me.