Quote:
Originally Posted by Xenophon
Actually, it does matter in US law. A number of other cases (missing the references right now, darn it!) have extended Autodesk to cover exactly this issue. In US law this very similarity to Amazon's other sales...
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"The court cannot characterize Autodesk's decision to let its licensees retain possession of the software forever as something other than a transfer of ownership, despite numerous restrictions on that ownership."
And that's half the point. If there are restrictions on the owner which can generate a breach of licence, then that breach - even if not in itself actionable or even permissible - is also a copyright violation and thus de-facto actionable. The other half is that a supplementary post-sale licence agreement was agreed to by MDY industries, and it was that - and not the sale of the disk to them - on which they were judged.
It may well be that the precedent set in Blizzard vs MDY Industries is overturned - and I believe it's not well regarded - but in the meantime it does create a considerable issue.