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eBay Seller Sues Autodesk for $10 Million
Miasik.Net writes "A lawsuit has been filed in Federal Court (US District Court for the Western Washington District C07-1189 JLR) that alleges Autodesk, Inc maker of the industry standard AutoCAD software and their attorney Andrew S. Mackay have devised an illegal scheme to have used copies of their software removed from the eBay site using the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. Finally someone decided that non-transferable licenses must be stopped." While proving $10 million in damages might prove difficult, the reasoning behind the case is pretty sound.
Which is it:
1) Does the seller have the "burden of proof" to prove that he uninstalled his copy and is not violating his license or
2) Is the seller to be given the "benefit of the doubt" and assumed to have uninstalled his copy, unless information is found to indicate otherwise?
note: I am probably using legal terms like "burden of proof" incorrectly. but you get my question.
Interesting how similar this story is to this one, from a while back, about restricting the sale of used CDs. In both cases you have the manufacturer wanting to restrict the first sale doctrine's rights in order to sell more of their product.
Actually, now that I think about it, I use some high-priced manufacturing software that, IIRC, states much the same thing: you don't own the software (nor the hardware dongle required to run it); it is all property of the manufacturer. There was even a clause in there about selling used software - they stated that you were allowed to do it, but it had to be for a specified amount, and they got a fee out of it. It all sounds fairly bogus to me.
"Anyone who [rips a CD] is probably engaging in copyright infringement." - David O. Carson
A friend of mine who I work with who has a legit version of AutoCAD, but he never installed it and downloads the cracked versions from P2P or Bittorrent (the ones that also doesn't require the dongle, even though he has a legit one.) While it seems obvious that many people won't pay for this software simply because it is very expensive, you can't help but think that practices like this, that don't allow you to resell you software that you don't use anymore, only contribute to people pirating software. I mean, what if he got it for a company he worked for and then the company tanked a few months later? It's a completely unrealistic expectation. Unfortunately, we have another program requiring dongle keys that is even more expensive that isn't widespread enough for hackers to worry about, so we have to bother calling the company every 6 months to get our extra keys reactivated, as well as being locked into the software, because it was too expensive to abandon, but the learning curve is too high on this type of designing software to switch to another without a major drop in productivity and a huge initial investment.
"Thank you for using Stop-n-Drop, America's favorite suicide booth since 2008"
> There was even a clause in there about selling used software - they stated that you were allowed to do it,
> but it had to be for a specified amount, and they got a fee out of it.
Not really, sound pretty fair. You see, you ARE allowed to resell software and AutoDesk is going to get smacked in court but support and upgrades aren't part of the First Sale Doctrine. By your vendor specifying a procedure and fee to transfer ownership of the license along with the title to the copyrighted work it means the buyer gets upgrades, bug fixes and the same level of tech suport you have now. If the fee is reasonable it would be very fair, especially when dealing with specialized software that needs support.
Democrat delenda est
Reminds me of when I called Nevada DMV and asked if this rumor was true that there was no tax on used vehicles. They plainly said, "we already collected tax on that car when it was first sold, why would we need it again?".
Aww fuck I though, I should have left California a long time ago.