Re: Utterly imbecile pinky communist Ninth Circuit 'judges' (Vernor scandalous ruling)

[David Kastrup]

Alexander Terekhov <terekhov@web.de> writes:

> (to information@eff.org, action@eff.org, litigation@citizen.org)
>
> A court headquotered in California overruled California Civil Code?
>
> It has been pointed out that Vernor opinion suggesting that Vernor was 
> not an owner of copies he bought (suggesting that it was not his 
> property) contradicts California Civil Code:
>
> http://law.justia.com/california/codes/2009/civ/654-663.html
>
> "The ownership of a thing is the right of one or more persons to 
> possess and use it to the exclusion of others. In this Code, the thing 
> of which there may be ownership is called property."
>
> It's unbelievable... simply unbelievable.

It's actually rather simple.  The media transfers into the property of
the buyer.  The copyrightable content not.  Connected with the purchase
of the media as a carrier of copyrightable material are certain rights
granted by copyright.  Since copyright law has not really kept up all
too well with computing realities, there is some haze about whether this
includes the actual purpose of the software, namely running it.  So we
get the typical click-through licenses that purport to grant the right
of running the software in return for any number of restrictions the
user has to agree to.

Putting contractual hurdles before the _intended_ use of software on a
medium makes a mess of copyright in itself regarding all rights that are
supposed to transfer to the buyer (like first sale), since the buyer
can't make any use of the bought product without giving up rights he was
supposed to receive.

Anyway: if you agree in the course of an upgrade agreement to destroy
previous copies, I don't think you can well argue that selling them on
Ebay counts as meeting that agreement.

-- 
David Kastrup