[Discussioni] ACM Technews

[Francesco Potorti`]

# "Software is Often Sold, Not Licensed, Despite What License
Agreements Say" Wall Street Journal Online (06/27/02); Hart, Jon;
Blumenthal, Steve

To control their intellectual property, software vendors are
requiring customers and distributors to sign licensing agreements
that limit buyers' rights to do what they please with the products,
yet this runs counter to the basic fact that customers are purchasing
copies of the software. A court recently ruled that Los Angeles-based
Softman Products had the right to unbundle and resell a boxed
collection of Adobe software despite Adobe's objections that it could
not do so under its licensing agreement, because the distributor
successfully argued that it had bought the programs and was therefore
entitled to use them as it saw fit. Copyright law grants copyright
holders the right to sell a copy of their property once, after which
the right of ownership passes on to the buyer. However, the
downstream market for the software industry is limited by the rapid
production of new versions of software that render old programs
obsolete. The emergence of e-commerce has caused a considerable
acceleration of downstream transfers, and this has sparked
controversy: Amazon.com promotes the sale of used books alongside
that of new books, and the Authors Guild has opposed this policy by
asking its members to sever their Web site links with Amazon.
Meanwhile, the music industry is trying to guard its intellectual
property online by selling music services, but with provisions that
severely limit consumers' usage rights--for example, MusicNet
subscribers can only play streamed songs once, are forbidden from
transferring songs to CDs or portable players, and must renew their
subscriptions in order to prevent the songs they download from
vanishing after a month.
http://online.wsj.com/article/0,,SB1024436103624547920.djm,00.html
(Access for paying subscribers only.)