Reading over the court decision to allow private resale of software licenses, I see that their reasoning was simple, consisting of two points:
- In European law, software falls under the category of Book. Once a customer buys a book, the publisher loses control over the fate of the book -- the "rights are exhausted by first sale," as the court put it.
- European law supersedes anything a corporate lawyer might choose to include in license terms.
The law suit was brought by Oracle against a used software seller in Europe, and the plan backfired when Oracle lost.
You can read the decision by the Court of Justice for the European Union for yourself (PDF) here: http://curia.europa.eu/jcms/upload/docs/application/pdf/2012-07/cp120094en.pdf
Thank you for this post. I’ve been following Oracle’s lawsuit these past months, and I must admit that it came as a surprise that they lost the case. Will they be submitting an appeal to the court?
Posted by: Effective Data Capture | Aug 09, 2012 at 04:32 PM