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Microsoft: You Need Permission to Sell Our Software
IEEEmember writes "Microsoft has objected to the sale of bankrupt KMart's Bluelight.com Internet unit to United Online. Microsoft's objection to the sale is based on the non-transferability of software licenses protected by copyright law according to the Reuters story on Yahoo! News. This action by Microsoft should serve as a warning to any corporation that has a significant investment in Microsoft licenses. Dependency on Microsoft licenses may grant Microsoft the ability to veto your business decisions."
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Seth
$5 / month hosted VPS on linux = awesome!
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If all this should have a reason, we would be the last to know.
> When you call up MS or signup with their Open or Select license plans, you basically agree to more restrictions for a reduced price
Well actually...
Our company has purchased several different types of Microsoft products including Retail, OEM and Open License. Strangely enough, the Open License copies were the most expensive (even when bought from a wholesaler). They way the Rep explained it, licenses would be easier to transfer within the Open License program which was the main selling point (that and we only have to keep a record of one key per program). If this is not the case, then we have a little three-way conversation that needs to take place between the Microsoft rep, me and my baseball bat.
Just my $0.02CDN (approximately $0.01273USD)
Good point. This isn't about EULA's at all. This would be a very legally binding contract that was signed by the executives of both companies. There are usually no gray areas left behind in one of these licenses.
Carpe Cerevisi - Seize the Beer
The state blocking a sale for tax reasons isn't news relevant to this site. MS blocking it due to software licensing is. FUD yourself.
Actually one of the selling points of the various volume licensing programs is their ease in tracking. If you have 200 machines, or 2000 machines or whatever then you don't want to keep that many items around, and you don't want to track that much paper. In the various license agreements all you have to do is track your agreement numbers, which probaby don't even fill up a single sheet of paper. When BSA shows up you just go out to microsoft's site, punch your agreement numbers up and click a button and right there is a list of how many of each product you have licensed.
Typically the most liberal license that microsoft gives goes along with their FPP (Full Package Product) licesnses. These are the ones you walk down to the store and buy off the shelf. The volume agreements restrict a few of the rights, mainly transferability. You still have liberal downgrade rights etc. The OEM licenses are the most restrictive. Until Windows XP came out you couldn't legally run a copy of WinNT 4.0 on a machine with an OEM Win2k license. The Windows XP OEM license does provide downgrade rights, but many of the other OEM licenses (Office for example) do not.
How do I know all this? Well after the company I work for was hit with a Microsoft audit about 2 years ago part of my job became keeping up to date on Microsoft's various licensing programs.
"You can't fight in here! This is the war room" --Dr. Stra
If you can't sell your licenses, how did Bluelight buy them when it bought KMart? Or was KMart always part of Bluelight?
You got it backwards. KMart set up Bluelight in an attempt to cash in on both the Net and their reputation ("Blue-light special on aisle 4!"), hence the name "Bluelight".
Fascism starts when the efficiency of the government becomes more important than the rights of the people.
What if I decide to sell my company? The software I've developed is certainly an integral part of the value of my company. Would GPL require me to publish all of the modified source code if I sell the company?
No. You don't even have to hand it over to the new owners if you don't want them to have it, unless, of course, you are letting them use the binaries.
The source and binaries accompany each other under the GPL, or at least they are both availble. Unless you are selling your company to the general public, you don't have to release your code to the general public.
Her bill that she introduced near the end of this legislative session (the companion bill to Boucher's) would formally extend the doctrine of first sale to cover this sort of situation (i.e. once you've purchased a license, you can transfer your rights to another person or entity without the permission of the copyright owner). Then we wouldn't even be talking about all this.
Tuck
Tuck's Journal.
development houses -- they can't escape to Linux even if it were a viable desktop replacement, which it's not).
... but not much. There is specialized software that isn't available for Linux, and some of what is available is too expensive. But how much of what is needed falls into that area?
Why do you say it's not a viable desktop replacement? It might need a bit of technical support for a few days
Linux isn't a viable desktop OS for neophytes without any support group. I'll agree with that, but that's a far different statement than your blanket assertion. For most companies, all it would take is a decision and a week or two. And you probably wouldn't move everyone. Moving 97% should suffice.
(Of course, if this starts happening seriously, the Open Office site will need more bandwidth...)
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
Such non-transferable license agreements will never stand up in court.
Reselling licensed software is no different than transfering ownership of a legally purchased music CD.
Last time I looked, second-hand record shops have been alive and well for decades.
US Court says buyers can unbundle EULA-covered software.
Also take a look at this very well argued thesis on the same issue. Same paper in HTML format
Another rant- my sister's boyfriend insists on calling it "tar-ghay" as if it were French or something.
Surprise, it IS French... French Canadian. It's what's left of the old Hudson Bay Trading Co. And although I'm not pretentious enough to use the French pronunciation (living as I do in the great state of Flarda) I have in fact seen Target execs pronounce it as "tar-JAY" in interviews.
To ensure perfect aim, shoot first and call whatever you hit the target
Kmart asked the court to overrule Microsoft's objection, saying the licenses the software maker referred to were not part of the sale. Kmart said the sale included one server license and 25 desktop licenses it bought from Microsoft.
It sounds like Kmart and Microsoft agree about what Kmart can or cannot do with the licenses and that it was merely a case of KMart not specifying that the licenses being talked about were not part of the sale.
Mmmm.. Donuts
Or not...
Target is a subsidiary of what used to be the Dayton-Hudson Corporation (now Target, Inc., since the child process is way more successful than the parent process), which was created by the merger of Dayton's, a Minneapolis based family-owned department store and Hudson's, a Detroit-based family-owned department store. The Hudson family in Detroit has little or nothing to do with Hudson Bay Trading Co. I love how facts get distorted when people remember a word or two and make up a story to go along with what they remember.
Now, "The Bay", a retail chain in Canada may in fact have something to do with the Hudson's Bay Co.
Silly Rabbit, sigs are for kids.
The alternatives for K-mart are actually quite viable. Microsoft is not the great monolith in the server space that it is in desktop computing. To imply anything else is to be genuinely out of touch with reality.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
Just a little reality check; there is plenty to argue about here. What almost everyone in this thread seems to have ignored (and what makes the case interesting, despite the tiny dollars apparently involved) is that this is a bankruptcy proceeding. The question is not whether you or I can resell our MS products under the EULA, it's whether a bankruptcy court chooses to ignore the alleged "license" and deem the software an asset of the estate.
It is important to remember that Bankruptcy Courts, unlike ordinary courts, are not required to attempt to enforce the will of the parties to a given contract. Rather, they are supposed to look through the contract and determine whether the terms, as written, create a fraudulent (or otherwise voidable) conveyance. Consider the following: I know I am going bankrupt, but I want to save my Ferrari. I agree to sell it to you for a dollar. You agree not to sell it to anyone else for a year and to sell it back to me in one year for 100 dollars. In return you get the use of the Ferrari. We sign the contract, title passes to you and I declare bankruptcy. A year later I have discharged my debts, I'm free and clear and I enforce my contractual right to buy back my Ferrari for $100. Right?
Wrong. Such a contract would be voided by a Bankruptcy Court and you'd have to give up the car. You'd probably even lose the dollar you paid. The car would become part of estate and would be sold. The money would be used to pay creditors. This is called fraudulent conveyance. It's pretty complicated (and dull) and I can't begin to give all necessary details here but what is interesting about this case is that a court will decide whether the material effect of a purchase of software if to transfer ownership or merely to create a license right, regardless of the language in the EULA.
IAAL, and my guess is the Court will punt on it and come up with other reasons to permit the transfer.
"The true administration of justice is the firmest pillar of good government." - George Washington
You MUST contact Microsoft and establish that the license can be transfered. Period.
No. You are bound ONLY by the terms of the EULA that shows up when the software is installed (or that's included with the box when you buy your computer.)
Read the license, understand its terms, and all will be well. The license is "permission" to make copies of the software--and if the license is voided, you no longer have permission and need to talk to MS all over again. (Or just buy a stock license.)
That's truth. Not FUD.
Let's look at the statement:
" No - this is an attempt to pass on the truth. You are obfuscating the point of the story - Microsoft is FINALLY pointing out that your software licenses are THEIR property, not yours."
Sounds like FUD to me. The SOFTWARE is MS's property, but the LICENSE is whomever paid money for it. If you get a "license" that the person who originally aqquired it is not allowed to transfer, then you don't have permission.
You are guilty of spreading FUD, the same as someone who claims that code compiled with gcc needs to be GPL'd is. MS cannot surprise you with unforseen terms--not unless there's a "MS may modify this" clause in the license.
Your actually wrong here. If you sell your computer to Jo Bob down the street the copy of Windows is actually illegal. Microsoft was sending out fliers to schools and other non-profits recently that explained how they had to be careful with licenses on computers.
Interesting thing, this US law. In Germany the Federal Constitutional Court ruled otherwise. According to this rules you can perfectly legally buy a computer with an OEM licence and sell only the licence or only the computer and keep the other part of the bundle (or sell it to someone else).
The reasoning was, that Copyright (or the german equivalent Urheberrecht, roughly translated to Author's Right) can't provide any means to control distribution channels. First sale doctrin rules higher than Copyright. By the way: Click-tru-licences are no valid contracts in Germany anyway, because you have a contract with your dealer when you buy software, not a contract with the author of the software. So the only way for the author to control your usage of the software is the Author's Right, and this is a law and not a contract.
A couple of years ago I was outfitting an office with Office 2000.
We needed about 60 copies.
I first called Microsoft; they told me there was no real discount to be had unless we had more copies (or more other microsoft products in the same class in the same purchase). We weren't large enough to get a discount.
Okay.. fine. So I called my favorite var.
They gave us a nice price.. better than what MS offered us on bulk licensing. Then they came back with an even better deal:
"Well, if you buy 50 copies of Microsoft Works, and then 50 copies of Office 2000 Upgrade, you end up saving about $150 off each copy".
Now. think about this for a second.
Going to a retail outlet and buying a truckload of software I'm never even going to use along with the product I want was actually way cheaper than simply asking microsoft for bulk licensing (which doesn't require them to ship a truckload of boxes).
That's messed up.
Back about 10 years ago, the New York Times did a piece on a firm of lawyers in Texas that was particularly (ie vicious and nasty) respected because they could put anyone away with their particularly hard-hitting tactics, like depositioning the executives of a software firn to death while their business went to hell. The firm's initials were B & B. They developed these tactics about transfers of software to other firms in various deals. A certain insurance company had licensed software from a big software company. The insurance company got into financial trouble, divested some subsidiaries, and then outsourced its data center to a firm that was not the author of the insurance system running in the data center. B & B showed up representing the company that marketed the system and sued. During the trial, the people who had 'written' the system testified that they had copied it directly from a system put into the public domain by IBM, but B&B managed to 'win' the case by forcing both the insurance company and their data center outsourcer to surrender under the legal onslaught.