3 ms·
I never understood, why companies think that software must not follow the first sale doctrine, I am not only talking about games... We have things like always
by speeder 14y ago
I never understood, why companies think that software must not follow the first sale doctrine, I am not only talking about games...
We have things like always on DRM to block used game sales, various softwares that phone home, dongles, and lets not forget of the infamous lawsuit of Autodesk against a guy that sold some copies of their software that he had legally obtained.
Of course, this is one of the main reasons behind the cloud push, making software become a service instead of a product.
But I don't trust it, I prefer a world where software, is a product, not necessarily tangible, download only is fine, but you should be allowed to truly own it, otherwise you are vulnerable to it being yanked from you, like Amazon yanked books from Kindles.
- jiggy2011 14y agoIt's because of the fundamental physics involved. When you give somebody is a paperback book it is fundamentally a "move" operation. When you give somebody a software program it is fundamentally a "copy" operation so the original owner still has it. The only way to simulate a move operation is to follow the copy operation very shortly with a delete operation on the original media. Of course if you are copying data from a device that you own then the manufacturer or media owner has no way of knowing if that delete operation really happened. So they try and work around this with increasingly sophisticated methods to force a delete operation. However these are usually not effective against a determined attacker, so the easiest thing to do is simply to disallow the move operation altogether.