4 ms·

It's generally a two-week turnaround for uncovered equipment, if they have remaining stock, which they always do. Given that SMARTnet-covered equipment turnarou

by s_q_b 12y ago

It's generally a two-week turnaround for uncovered equipment, if they have remaining stock, which they always do. Given that SMARTnet-covered equipment turnaround can be 2-hour, 4-hour, or NBD and Cisco's massive global network of warehouses, it appears this constraint is artificially imposed to keep SMARTnet attach rates high. It's very odd that "grey market" equipment is considered the standard way to refer to genuine Cisco equipment when sold by a company other than a Cisco partner. I understand keeping out counterfeits, but given the first-sale doctrine, how is a resold piece of equipment anything other than completely legitimate? If you think about it, and get past the "it's just industry standard" mentality, it's generally insane the way that Cisco uses these pseudo-monopoly tactics. In the old days, say with maintenance on IBM Selectric typewriters, such schemes were called "bundling" and "tying," and the DOJ would pursue the companies for anti-trust violations. Now, the DOJ arrests people based upon nebulous complaints from Cisco's general counsel. See e.g. http://abovethelaw.com/2011/07/sue-a-giant-corporation-get-rewarded-with-audacious-criminal-charges/#more-84911 http://abovethelaw.com/2011/07/sue-a-giant-corporation-get-r... wherein a British citizen was arrested in Canada for starting a company that competed with Cisco maintenance. The Canadian court quashed the request for extradition after the DOJ's request trapped him in a foreign country for years. He remains under indictment here, despite the Canadian judge stating that the DOJ's case was a fairly transparent copy of Cisco's civil suit. The ruling was incendiary, stating that The extradition process to bring the applicant before United States Courts… involved innuendo, half truths and complete falsehoods. The judge concluded: The only reasonable inference I can draw from the facts is that the criminal process was used to pressure (unsuccessfully) the applicant into abandoning his antitrust suit against Cisco…. Any well-informed person acquainted with the truth would conclude that the collective result of the mistreatment of Mr. Adekeye offended fundamental notions of justice.

MichaelGG 12y ago
Doesn't this just make them want to go sidestep the issue and say you're not licensed to run the software, even if you can resell the hardware? Didn't Autodesk win on that, with respect to licensing software?
- s_q_b 12y ago
  The "first-sale doctrine" is a legal concept that applies to combination hardware and software products. Essentially it holds that the copyright of any combination of a piece of intellectual property (e.g. Cisco IOS, or the information in a textbook) and a physical product (e.g. a router or the actual copy of a textbook book) is exhausted after the first sale. [0] Now, there are court-recognized exceptions to this rule in various circuit courts (most significantly by the 9th Circuit in Vernor v. Autodesk, SCOTUS cert denied) for digital goods under the so-called "shrink-warp licensing" exception. [1] So given that the highest court has allowed the ruling to stand in a large circuit, yet has consistently expanded the first-sale doctrine for four decades [2], the precedent is unclear. Cisco does rely on Vernor and its progeny as it's justification for blacklisting resold items. But that argument is unlikely to hold water outside of the software-laden 9th Circuit. The question, stated in layman's terms, is, "To which is a Cisco router or switch more similar, a copy of Windows or an iPod?" This is an open question from a legal standpoint, and thus we must unfortunately resort to that most unreliable of legal tools: reason. Both options are almost equally unpalatable to the Supreme Court for policy reasons. Expand the shrink-wrap exception to cover Cisco and you risk encompassing all products that contain firmware, from TVs to microwaves, and thus strangling the half-trillion dollar secondary sale market for electronic goods. Keep the exception narrow and you choke off the single largest source of revenue (all told, including gains from new purchases, maintenance contracts, and paid software updates close to $20 Billion, or 40% of annual revenue) to the government's largest IT hardware provider (over 85% of DoD in particular), leaving the government stranded with vast networks of legacy Cisco hardware with little to no new development from the company. The existing legal precedent creates a tough needle for the Court to thread. As a result, we have the current state of limbo, and thus discussion of "grey markets," which are neither clearly legal nor clearly illegal. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First-sale_doctrine https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First-sale_doctrine [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vernor_v._Autodesk,_Inc https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vernor_v._Autodesk,_Inc. [2] Most recently in Kirtsaeng v. John Wiley & Sons, Inc., No. 11-697 (U.S. Mar. 19, 2013)
  - mprovost 12y ago
    The lack of a legal secondary market can also mess with your accounting. If you don't have the right to resell the equipment because you are the sole owner of the license to the software, then its value is basically zero as soon as you buy it. Most accounting methods assume that goods retain value over time and depreciate in a set schedule. Otherwise every time you bought a Cisco router or Netapp filer the book value would be zero if it wasn't legal to sell, even during a bankruptcy auction etc.

by s_q_b 12y ago

MichaelGG 12y ago

Doesn't this just make them want to go sidestep the issue and say you're not licensed to run the software, even if you can resell the hardware? Didn't Autodesk win on that, with respect to licensing software?

s_q_b 12y ago
The "first-sale doctrine" is a legal concept that applies to combination hardware and software products. Essentially it holds that the copyright of any combination of a piece of intellectual property (e.g. Cisco IOS, or the information in a textbook) and a physical product (e.g. a router or the actual copy of a textbook book) is exhausted after the first sale. [0] Now, there are court-recognized exceptions to this rule in various circuit courts (most significantly by the 9th Circuit in Vernor v. Autodesk, SCOTUS cert denied) for digital goods under the so-called "shrink-warp licensing" exception. [1] So given that the highest court has allowed the ruling to stand in a large circuit, yet has consistently expanded the first-sale doctrine for four decades [2], the precedent is unclear. Cisco does rely on Vernor and its progeny as it's justification for blacklisting resold items. But that argument is unlikely to hold water outside of the software-laden 9th Circuit. The question, stated in layman's terms, is, "To which is a Cisco router or switch more similar, a copy of Windows or an iPod?" This is an open question from a legal standpoint, and thus we must unfortunately resort to that most unreliable of legal tools: reason. Both options are almost equally unpalatable to the Supreme Court for policy reasons. Expand the shrink-wrap exception to cover Cisco and you risk encompassing all products that contain firmware, from TVs to microwaves, and thus strangling the half-trillion dollar secondary sale market for electronic goods. Keep the exception narrow and you choke off the single largest source of revenue (all told, including gains from new purchases, maintenance contracts, and paid software updates close to $20 Billion, or 40% of annual revenue) to the government's largest IT hardware provider (over 85% of DoD in particular), leaving the government stranded with vast networks of legacy Cisco hardware with little to no new development from the company. The existing legal precedent creates a tough needle for the Court to thread. As a result, we have the current state of limbo, and thus discussion of "grey markets," which are neither clearly legal nor clearly illegal. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First-sale_doctrine https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First-sale_doctrine [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vernor_v._Autodesk,_Inc https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vernor_v._Autodesk,_Inc. [2] Most recently in Kirtsaeng v. John Wiley & Sons, Inc., No. 11-697 (U.S. Mar. 19, 2013)
- mprovost 12y ago
  The lack of a legal secondary market can also mess with your accounting. If you don't have the right to resell the equipment because you are the sole owner of the license to the software, then its value is basically zero as soon as you buy it. Most accounting methods assume that goods retain value over time and depreciate in a set schedule. Otherwise every time you bought a Cisco router or Netapp filer the book value would be zero if it wasn't legal to sell, even during a bankruptcy auction etc.