Federal Court Says First-Sale Doctrine Covers Software, Too

New10k writes "The US District Court in Seattle has rejected Autodesk's myriad arguments regarding its software licenses and found in favor of eBay seller Timothy S. Vernor. The ruling started by ruling that Vernor was within his rights to resell copies of AutoCAD Release 14 he got in an auction. Once the court settled the legitimacy of reselling, it used that ruling as a lens to dismiss all of Autodesk's various claims. More than once the court described Autodesk's arguments as 'specious' and 'conflicted.'" Autodesk managed to have Vernor's eBay account pulled, after he listed for sale copies of AutoCad 14. He sued Autodesk in response.

Re:First-Sale cuts both ways

[ak3ldama]

Mr. A.C. little guy, could we get a link to this online boat building video? Preferably the rental.

Re:Workaround

[Dachannien]

Reusing the key would require that the previous owner relinquish the key from their account. It's apparent that the previous user, um, neglected to do that before he sold you his copy of WoW on eBay.

On a side note, I have this bridge I'd like to sell on the cheap. Interested?

Re:First-Sale cuts both ways

[pegr]

Actually, they do. They buy their copies of the movies through a distributor who acts as the studios' agent.

 
There is only one circumstance within which video rental stores have a contract (indirectly) with studios, and that's for PPT, or Pay Per Transaction. That is a voluntary agreement where the studios get a cut of every rental.

Otherwise, any legally owned copy of a copyrighted video work may be rented without any permission from the studios. My qualifications? I was an independent video store owner for 15 years, a long-standing member of the VSDA, and have worked with all the major distributors. I'm afraid you are completely and utterly wrong.

Apart from that, my slashdot UID is lower, my kids smarter, my wife prettier, and my crap smells like cinnamon rolls.

Have a nice day!

Re:Not really adding anything important but...

[orasio]

Kudos for inventing shareware!! (Not that I like it)

Re:So true

[Osurak]

Can you imagine the difficulty of trying to create a library if they already didn't exist. Publishers, Authors, Printers, MPAA, RIAA... they would all try to sue you into oblivion for essentially 'giving away' what they rightfully own.

Yeah, seriously, thank $deity for prior art

Re:First-Sale cuts both ways

[Anonymous Coward]

...and my crap smells like cinnamon rolls

Uh. You might want to see a doctor about that.

Re:Autodesk = a true evil empire

[Anonymous Coward]

I can surely attest to this. While in school for CS, I was a junior administrator in the MIS department, doing things like... well, everything that went wrong on the computer network.

That's pretty neat, I used to fix things.

Re:So true

[pdbaby]

Yeah, seriously, thank $deity for prior art

Global symbol "$deity" requires explicit package name at comment line 2.
Execution of comment aborted due to compilation errors.
If only these people had typed "use strict;" before their religious texts :-)