What's the legal basis for this? Under what circumstances can a contract I never even saw apply to me?
(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...
The problem is more that he bought the licence off someone who had seen the contract, albiet a nominal sight. Remember those 'you must accept this 10000 word agreement' every time you install anything on your computer?
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.
It's also not clear to me what distinguishes this from the book EULAs that were held unenforceable in the original 1908 case. Publishers there printed purported "licenses" on the copyright page of their books, including terms like "you may not resell this book for less than $1.00". But those were held not to be enforceable, because it was held that the contractual relationship between publisher and bookbuyer is terminated when the sale is completed, at least in the normal case of books sold at retail (books provided under privately negotiated contracts, like documentation provided under an NDA, can still be enforced).
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.
This sort of nonsense got me to look up free software CAD programs. Sadly, the big one is BRL-CAD and the documentation for it is downright depressing.
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.
Yeah, it's an unfortunate niche. I think it's the sort of thing where there are companies that would be happy to contribute back code, but only if a CAD program were already at 80% of their needs. But without commercial support, the hobbyist-CAD community is way too small to get a system to that 80% to begin with. Lots of industry doesn't really enjoy paying large per-seat license fees for the dominant CAD systems, so I think they'd be willing to work on an open-source one and contribute back, the way embedded-systems companies do with Linux, but they aren't willing to take a leap onto something that isn't there yet
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.
> Also, that Amazon EULA is quite strange. You aren't allowed to "synchronize" the music file you bought?
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.
The article says this ruling came from US Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit. Can the case still be appealed, e.g. to the Supreme Court, or what? (I'm not a lawyer.)
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.
The 9th is by far the largest circuit, so its rates of being successfully appealed and overturned are proportionately greater.
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.
So, to recap: EULAs are binding, they can control just about everything you might dream up, and only Congress can change the situation.
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.
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?