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.
Read 9 remaining paragraphs | Comments
DIGITAL JUICE
No comments:
Post a Comment
Thank's!