Tony Stark Larry Ellison takes a hit in Europe
From
Ars Technica:
Top EU court upholds right to resell downloaded software
The European Court of Justice has ruled that customers have a right to resell software they purchase regardless of whether the software was originally distributed on a physical medium or downloaded over the Internet. The ruling is a defeat for Oracle, which had argued that the court should uphold provisions in its license agreement prohibiting such transfers.
Software vendors have long argued that software is "licensed, not sold." This claim is in tension with the doctrine of copyright exhaustion (called the first sale doctrine in the United States), which holds that copyright law does not give rightsholders control over used copies of their work. And the principle has gotten even more murky as software is increasingly distributed directly over digital networks, meaning that there's no physical copy of the work to resell.
Oracle distributes its software online. Once a customer has signed a licensing agreement, they have an unlimited right to download copies of the database software from Oracle's website, and to install as many copies of the software as specified in the licensing agreement. A company called UsedSoft acted as a broker for used Oracle licenses, allowing Oracle customers who no longer need their licenses to resell them to another firm that could put them to better use.
Oracle sued UsedSoft, arguing that UsedSoft was merely facilitating piracy of its software. The database giant noted that its license agreements specifically state that licenses are nontransferable. And it argued that the exhaustion doctrine only applied to physical copies, like CDs or DVDs, not to copies downloaded from a website.
On Wednesday, the European Court of Justice, the EU's highest court, decisively rejected Oracle's arguments.
I can see a very big gray area if I were to purchase a license for Version 1.0 for $500 and then paid a $100 upgrade fee for Version 2.0 -- for that scenario, I should not be able to resell my 1.0 license as the price I paid for Version 2.0 was not a full purchase price, it depended on my already owning the product.
If I purchased a license and then stopped using the software altogether and uninstalled it from my computer -- zero problem.
Posted by DaveH at July 3, 2012 2:41 PM