No, you don't own it: Court upholds EULAs, threatens digital resale
arstechnica.com
arstechnica.com
Are they going to demand the money back from everybody that wrote off software as a depreciation?
Alternatively are people now going to be able to write off software as a cost rather than an asset?
(Why not just sell the disks and serial numbers, then? You can't use the software, wink wink nudge nudge, but the disk does have the software and the serial number will activate it.)
Also, that Amazon EULA is quite strange. You aren't allowed to "synchronize" the music file you bought? You can't have the music on your computer and on your mp3 player.
There's a rule that 0 of their customers follow...
There's a lot of dodginess going on in EULAs issued by software companies, for example I was forced to accept a 55 page legal document just to download a free app on iTunes the other day (the iTunes terms of service). I cannot believe that more than a tiny percentage of people have ever read those terms (and they know it).
Forced is a strong word, but how else could I use the phone I bought? It's a major selling point of the phone and yet there's a 55 page agreement to use it? Nonsense.
While I realise it's a 'legal' document, there's something very wrong with a legal system that essentially relinquishes basic consumer protection because they've made it impossible to use your purchase without relinquishing significant rights.
Courts shouldn't uphold these extremely complicated EULAs which basically say 'screw you'. In the end, a digital good which was never used should be able to be resold.
As others have said, we can only hope this is overturned as it does have massive implications for the future of digital goods.
Could something like that be upheld today if the publisher were a bit more careful with its legal fictions? Perhaps something like: You are granted a single, non-transferable, non-exclusive license to read this book. For your convenience, a hardcopy, which remains the sole property of Publishing Co., has been provided for your use. You may retain this copy so long as you remain in compliance with this license, but may not transfer it to any other party.
Their FAQ ( http://brlcad.org/wiki/FAQ ) tells me that the silly thing can't even print out a drawing normally! Essentially, you render your current view to a BLR-CAD format, use a command line tool to turn that into a PNG, then print that via some other program, not supplied.
Does nobody using it print enough things to want a normal print dialog? If anyone wants to see what I mean, look for the question "How do I get a hard copy of what I'm looking at in MGED?" (MGED is the geometry editor for BRL-CAD.)
To be fair, their list of priorities DOES list UI improvement. I'll have to see if I can find some ways to help... assuming I figure out how to use this thing.
BRL-CAD's particular problems are because it's sort of a time-capsule project, I think. It's an Army project from the 1980s that was open-sourced in 2004, but is still very "1980s Unix workstation" in a lot of ways, and the ratio of interested developers to giant crufty codebase has meant that modernizing it is slow.
Actually, "synchronize" in copyright has nothing to do with copying a file from your computer to your mp3 player. This right is for using the recording as part of a video, film, tv commercial or other work where the music is played.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Synchronization_rights
They use that specific term because it is used in the law.
I hope it gets appealed and this ruling is overturned.
That said, if CamperBob at http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1680416 is correct in that "It involved a user who sold copies that were contractually supposed to be destroyed (or at least not reinstalled) after an upgrade" then the copies were never legit to begin with and the First-sale doctrine is not necessarily in jeopardy.
Conventional wisdom says that the 9th gets overturned when its decisions skew too liberal. The Roberts court is far less likely to overturn a decision perceived as skewing "business-friendly". Nothing's more business-friendly than enforcing contracts, right? Personal responsibility and all that.
Huge leap. From what I can tell, the ruling only applies to resale, and can't reliably be construed to imply that you can barter for people's souls in a EULA or what have you.