Comment: Re:OK then. (Score 4, Informative) 908
They can try all the EULA crap that they want. That does not make it right, or legally defensible in a court of law.
I am not sure if that is true any more (in the US) since late last year in the Autodesk trial.
From the Freedom to Tinker blog:
The Ninth Circuit's decision in Vernor significantly erodes the first sale doctrine with respect to software and other mass-licensed digital goods.
In Timothy Vernor's case, however, the publisher of the AutoCad software argued that it never actually sold the copies Vernor bought, so there was no "first sale" for copyright purposes. Under the software publisher's logic, which the Ninth Circuit adopted in the case, both the copy and the intellectual property embodied in the copy were only licensed, and quite restrictively so, pursuant to the terms of a mass end user license agreement (EULA); nothing was ever sold, despite the retail transaction that put copies of the software into the hands of the initial purchaser, and despite the downstream transaction that put those copies into Timothy Vernor's hands.
Under Vernor, software copyright owners not only own the work embodied in every copy of a program they sell, they own every copy, too. Consumers are left with both empty pockets and empty hands.
I strongly believe First Sale doctrine should extend to software, but the EULA looks like it is sneaking in to block it.