EU court rules: it’s okay to resell downloaded software

Source: Wikimedia Commons

Users of digitally downloaded software can sell it on secondhand, providing they deactivate or delete the original copy from their hard drive, the European Court of Justice has ruled.

The ruling comes in a case referred to the ECJ from a German court involving Oracle and local firm usedSoft, which resells secondhand licences of its software: a practice Oracle was trying to block.

The ruling has implications for developers like Autodesk, which has argued in the past that users merely license its software temporarily, rather than buying it outright, and do not have the right to sell it on.

This view was successfully challenged in the US courts in 2009.

Downloaded software is owned software, too
Today’s ruling, which applies to the whole of the European Union, clears up a further grey area: whether digitally downloaded copies of software can be resold.

While today’s news will be welcome to anyone looking to sell on CG software, there are limitations. First, the ECJ ruling only covers perpetual licenses, so it wouldn’t apply to Adobe’s new Creative Cloud, for example.

And secondly, it only applies to downloaded products, not those provided as software as a service, where data is streamed to the users’s machine, but the software itself resides elsewhere in the cloud: a model that Autodesk is increasingly beginning to adopt with services like PLM 360.

There are a number of other fine points, too, so if you’re interested in this issue, the article linked below, which provides a more detailed analysis of the case, is well worth reading.

Read about the European Court of Justice ruling on Out-Law.com