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Hardware Manufacturers Gouging Customers
rahlquist writes "An article over at infoworld discusses that buying that used router on ebay may not be a good deal if Cisco can find its way to screwing you. What's next, buy a used Ford and pay Ford to transfer the license for the onboard computer's OS or face piracy charges if you continue to drive?"
Someone owns a whole bunch of Cisco routers or other miscellaneous equipment. Once the equipment is no longer needed, they retain the license to the software while selling the hardware to someone else. Cisco rep complains, new hardware owner says "talk to the software licensee". When purchasing maintenance agreements and such, the hardware owner pays off the software licensee the cost of the maintenance agreement plus a small surcharge, and the software licensee pays Cisco the amount on Cisco's price list for the maintenance agreement.
The terms of the license agreement are fulfilled - it's just that the on-site location is changed.
When companies get greedy like this, it's all I can do to keep my calm. I'm not sure I agree that all information wants to be free, but used sofware licenses that are bound to hardware that is changing hands sure do.
The CB App. What's your 20?
More importantly, when you bought it (perhaps from someone like CDW) you bought the entire thing, there wasn't even an option to buy just the hardware. Now they want to claim they are two different parts???!!! That's completely bogus; if CDW can sell it to you then you can sell it to someone else. Also, if you did decide to sell the hardware and then sell the software to someone else, the legal principle known as Right of First Sale pretty much says that you indeed can sell the parts, even if NetApp doesn't like it.
I'm an American. I love this country and the freedoms that we used to have.
If you sell your used hardware to someone, then from the corporate viewpoint, YOU are depriving them of their right to sell NEW hardware to that person, hence you are infringing on the rights of a corporation !?! Lordie this country is hosed in the head....
errr....umm...*whooosh* *whoosh* Is this thing on ?
The point is, they want to encourage these eBay bargain shoppers to buy new stuff (curtailing the secondary market). As a result outdated hardware would just be tossed, because no one would want it (it would cost less to buy it new!). They are hoping that everyone will continue to buy all new hardware, and no one will be interested in used gear anymore. I suspect, however, that a large portion of the customers they hope to gain from this simply won't buy anything, because they won't be able/willing to fork over the cash for it.
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Crudely Drawn Games
Some managerial types have some very odd ideas about money. I knew a person who ran a motel back in the 1980's. He was charging $50/room in an area where the standard price was around $40/room. Needless to say he didn't rent very many rooms. A friend of mine was his accountant, and he suggested that the motel owner drop his prices to rent out more rooms. Mr. Idiot was horrified at the idea: "If I did that, I'd be loosing $10 on ever room I rented!" Apparently he had the fixed idea that when a room was rented he somehow deserved $50, so it was preferable to him to rent very few rooms at a higher price than to rent more rooms at a somewhat lower price. Eventually he went out of business.
Doubtless the same sort of idiocy is going on here.
The hardware manufacturers have always hated sale of used hardware. Using software licensing this way is just a club to try and smash the used hardware market, it has nothing to do with them worrying about their precious little software license being violated. One copy of software was bought, one copy of software exists. In this situation they have been paid for every copy of the software being used; no piracy is taking place. The entire "You bought a software license from us, and you can't sell that" line is total tripe. It may be legal, but it damn sure isn't right. The law needs to be changed to prohibit that sort of crap.
"Mission Accomplished" -- George W. Bush May 1, 2003
This isn't like Gamer PCs, where you _need_ a 4.77 GHz machine to keep up, or a Microsoft Office machine, where MS keeps making Office bigger and using the newer features of Windows, so you need to upgrade Windows, but you can't upgrade to Windows 2006 without upgrading to at least a 2GHz machine with 6.40GB of RAM. This is much more like the 486 Linux machine sitting in the corner acting as a DNS and DHCP server, or the Pentium 133 you're using as an X terminal.
But there are two popular reasons to sell a used router. One is that you're upgrading to a bigger router, and as you say, everyone wins including the router vendor. The other reason is that your dot-com died (or was bought by somebody who already had enough bandwidth in their offices) and you're selling the routers, the PCs, the chairs, the cubicle walls, and the t-shirts, and nobody's buying any new router except your happy E-Bay customer, and the router vendor loses a sale they might have gotten.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
The thing is, the market should be sorting this out.
When it comes to bad business practices in general, yes. But the fundamental problem here is that the law is not being applied properly. When the law itself is wrong then it is not a market issue, the law needs to be fixed. In general "free market forces" cannot fix legal problems.
There is a legal doctrine called "Right of First Sale".
US CODE COLLECTION: TITLE 17 CHAPTER 1 Sec. 109
the owner of a particular copy or phonorecord lawfully made under this title, or any person authorized by such owner, is entitled, without the authority of the copyright owner, to sell or otherwise dispose of the possession of that copy or phonorecord.
If you buy a book you have a legally guaranteed right to sell that book. That is why used book stores are legal. The same goes for CD's, video tapes, DVD, computer games, paintings, sculptures, poetry, cassettes, EVERYTHING.
You bought one copy you have the right to have a garage sale and sell that one copy. Once the copyright holder has created and sold that copy he has made his profit and has no further claim upon that particular copy. It may be transfered freely.
The problem here is that they are playing games with the word "owner". It is intened to cover anyone who pays for the legal possession of that copy. They are claiming that you are not the owner of that copy.
There have been bills floating around congress to correct this and other related poblems by changing occurrences of "owner" to "rightful possessor". Unfortunately it hasn't gone through yet.
Another thing, as far as I can tell this "licencing scheme" isn't actually legal anyway, though I know that the courts have been treating them as legitimate. Copyright holders can ONLY licence the right to make copies, the right to distribute copies, and teh right to public performance. If they don't grant you one or more of these rights then NO LICENCE EXISTS. Nor does a contract exist unless they offer something of value and you INTENTIONALLY CHOOSE to accept that offer. You are never bound by any contract that you have not chosen to be bound by.
Once they sell you a disk or any other medium with the software on it the law already SPECIFICLY grants you the right to install and run that software. You are perfectly free to reject the licence and install/use the software anyway so long as you are willing to pass on anything else they may offer in the licence.
Anyone who rejects my argument about linces can ignore all of that and just go back to what I said earlier about the bill floating around congress to fix the law by changing occurrences of "owner" to "rightful possessor". I don't know why it hasn't passed yet. Probably meddling from the copyright lobby.
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- - You can't take something off the Internet! That's like trying to take pee out of a swimming pool.
Once again the Slashdot reaction is totally off base. No wonder SCO and Microsoft have so much trouble taking this crowd seriously.
From the article:
"...when he contacted NetApp to purchase a maintenance agreement for the used system."
Two key words there: maintenance agreement.
First you have to remember that nobody is REQUIRED to provide that service. If you come to me and ask me to provide a service then I'm going to tell you what I will do and how much I want for it. If you don't like it then you can look elsewhere.
Anything else would be the same as you holding a gun to my head and forcing me to provide the service on your terms. That certainly isn't a fair business deal.
So you want to compare this to a Ford. Fine. Go get yourself a 96 Ford Contour with 100,000 miles on it from someone advertising in the local classifieds. Then drive or tow the thing down to your local Ford dealer and demand that they sell you a maintenance agreement for the same price as a current production model.
Go ahead, I'll wait.
Oh, you're back? Where's the car? Lemme guess, the guys at the dealership ended up pissing themselves from laughing so hard.
Maybe you should try again. Got that old Compaq 386 laptop out in the garage? Give Compaq/HP a call right now and tell them you want a 5 year maintenance agreement on the damn thing and you're not paying a penny more than $500 for it.
It must be because these are all corporations, right? We all know that anyone trying to do business and make a living is evil.
How about you? Would you want to operate the way Michael Tague expects?
Somehow I don't think that Mr. Tague would do business this way either if he were on the other side.
. Quit playing Monopoly with Bill. Switch to one of many non-Microsoft products today.