Topic: Good court rulings on patent and software licensing limitations.

[Nemesis]

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In the case before the Supreme Court, a South Korean company, LG Electronics Inc., licensed some of its patents to Intel Corp.

LG then sued some of Intel's customers for patent infringement, saying they owed royalties to LG because the customers combined Intel's microprocessors and chipsets with non-Intel products.

The judge ruled against LG and in favour of the customers.    Having a patent holder able to restrict what you could do with a device that you bought merely because they had a patent on the device is unreasonable and the judge agreed.

Add this to the recent support of a buyers right to resell software in the case brought by Autodesk over Autocad being resold on E-Bay and the courts seem to be going in the right direction on both patents and copyrights.

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Software companies have long claimed that software is not sold to users but licensed, and many software licences forbid the resale of the software. A Seattle District Court has found, though, that the packages of software in question were sold, not licensed, and that the licence is not binding on subsequent buyers.

[Rod ONeal]

About time. Software is such a racket!

How about they rule that the software should actually perform as intended. The manufacturers should have to fix buggy software for free. Not sell you an updated version in order to get bug fixes on the version that you've already paid for. That'd be nice too.

[Nemesis]

Apparently a century ago the book publishers tried the same thing with a license and the courts eventually threw it out.  We can hope that the courts will do the same for software licenses and such patent nonsense as this.  We can also hope that the politicians don't change the laws to enforce such licenses.

[marstone]

from what I was taught, software is suppose to work like books.  You have sole use of it, but can sell or lend it out.  But this was from years and years ago, hopefully the courts will go back to this idea.