The Story:
Autodesk, after a long wrangling legal battle has lost its suit that indeed software is not truly sold, but is in fact licensed. The ruling comes after a long legal dispute over whether a man could resell legal copies of Autodesk software. Yes say the courts, no says Autodesk. The man in the middle seemingly forgotten, is now again free to make a few dollars doing whatever it was that had been up to.
The ruling states that “The Autodesk License is a hodgepodge of terms that, standing alone, support both a transfer of ownership and a mere license,” meaning that no one short of a lawyer could understand it, let alone apply it. That this had to go to court is a definitive slap in the face of DCMA rulings in general, this one being specifically odious.
What We Think:
When I buy a copy of Sim City 2000, I can sell it to my friend. As much as the software companies would love to have it be illegal for me to transfer ownership of my property, when indeed I buy it, I do buy something other than a permission to use. Companies can easily get around this by running all their software as a hosted solution in the cloud. If you don’t want to do that, then you will deal with physical copies of your software, quick to go out of date.
The ruling here is clear, unless you make it plain that 100% you are merely giving one person a license, and not a product, they are more than free to resell their property to anyone else that they wish. If only Autodesk had saved all the time and money on the suit, and used that to make their software, even better.
