If It Looks Like a Duck . . . Seattle Judge Finds Software Was Sold, Not Licensed

In a major victory for consumers' rights, a federal district judge has firmly rejected software vendor AutoDesk's claim that its license agreement restricts its customers from re-selling the software they lawfully owned.

As we've discussed before, the copyright industries have struggled for years to convince courts and their customers that software is merely licensed, not sold. Why? Because the Copyright Act includes various protections for buyers of copyrighted material that limit sellers' ability to restrict how their customers can use their software. One of the most important of these protections is the "first sale" doctrine, which simply says that once you've acquired a lawfully-made CD or book or DVD, you can lend, sell, or give it away without having to get permission from the copyright owner. Without the "first sale" doctrine, libraries would be illegal, as would used bookstores, used record stores, video rental shops, CD-swapping communities and so on. If those books, records, videos etc. were merely licensed, the seller could simply refuse to give their customers permission to re-sell the material they bought, or put other onerous restrictions on resale. That way, they could force consumers to always buy new software, even if they would prefer to buy an older, possibly less expensive, version.

This proposition is being put to the test in the context of eBay sales. After Autodesk repeatedly alleged that Timothy Vernor was violating copyright law by attempting to sell copies of Autodesk's copyrighted AutoCAD software on eBay, Vernor (with the able assistance of Public Citizen attorney Greg Beck) asked the court to declare that his activity was legal under the first sale doctrine. Autodesk predictably responded by insisting that AutoCAD is licensed, not sold. Nonsense, said the court -- Autodesk may have called the transfer a license, but it didn't look much like one. For example, the license didn't require consumers to return the software when they were done with it, nor to make ongoing payments for continued use. Thus, the "license" might put some restrictions on use, but those restrictions did not void the first sale doctrine.

Kudos to Judge Richard Jones for seeing that if it looks like a duck and quacks like a duck, chances are it's a duck. And big congratulations to Vernor and his counsel, Greg Beck, for striking a major blow for consumer rights.

William Patry has an excellent post on the ruling and what this case can tell us about the DMCA safe harbors.

More information on the case available here.

The Social Media Gender Gap

Interesting article in Businessweek by Auren Hoffman discusses a somewhat surprising gender gap.

From the site:

"If Slide and RockYou, two of the fastest-growing Web businesses, are any barometer for the future, the Internet is going to look pink. In other words, the future of social media is going to be all about the women. So if you're going to create the next hot Web 2.0 site and you want it to go viral, you'll target women.

It's no shock that men and women act differently online, just as they do in everyday life. The Web is an extremely social medium, and Web 2.0 is all about being social. Traditionally, men are the early adopters of new technologies. But when it comes to social media, women are at the forefront. At Rapleaf we conducted a study of 13.2 million people and how they're using social media. While the trends indicate both sexes are using social media in huge numbers, our findings show that women far outpace the men."

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Pipes

Pipes really does allow you to "aggregate, manipulate, and mashup" the web. This tool is so powerful its hard to even begin scratching the surface. Create aggregated rss feeds for... goods or housing in your area, news from around the web, price alerts from auction sites, and anything else you can think of! If you ever wanted to dabble in programming, but didn't want the code thing to get in the way, here's your chance.

From the site:

"Pipes is a powerful composition tool to aggregate, manipulate, and mashup content from around the web. Like Unix pipes, simple commands can be combined together to create output that meets your needs:

* combine many feeds into one, then sort, filter and translate it.
* geocode your favorite feeds and browse the items on an interactive map.
* power widgets/badges on your web site.
* grab the output of any Pipes as RSS, JSON, KML, and other formats."

 

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Coupon queen spends $10/week on family groceries

Atlanta's Crissy Thompson is the queen of coupon-clipping -- she's so skilled at it that she's cut her weekly grocery bill to $10 for a family of five:
She buys two copies of the AJC's daily double Sunday paper, getting four papers, four sets of coupons, for $5. She also goes to her favorite coupon websites (see links).

On the day we're with Crissy, we tell her we just want a sampling of what she does. She tells us we're going to CVS and Publix, two of her favorite stores.

I do coupons every week myself so I was very curious to see how she did it.

At the Publix, Crissy got her best deals with the buy 1, get 1 free items.

Most local grocery stores will let you buy only one item and get it 50% off. If you pair a coupon with that (most grocery stores double coupons up to 50 cents) you can sometimes get the item for free or next to nothing.

What I learned from Crissy is that you can use one coupon per item.

All this time I had misunderstood what it says on each coupon, only one coupon per purchase. I took "purchase" to mean "transaction." It's not.

For example, Crissy grabbed two boxes of cereal that were buy 1, get 1 free. The cereal was $3.79 a box. Crissy had a three dollar coupon for each box of cereal. She made over $2.00 when she pulled those boxes off the shelves. I thought I could only use one coupon, no matter how many boxes or cans or whatever I'd bought. So that's good for me to know.

She didn't buy any produce or meat when we were with her. The best deals that week were elsewhere and she told us she often gets her produce from local farmers at a nearby market where prices are very inexpensive. When we got to checkout her bill was $15.38 and she saved $36.22. Basically she saved two thirds of the bill.

Link (via Consumerist)

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Sweet stop-motion video of paintings on public spaces


Debcha sez, "This is an incredibly arresting stop-motion video, both in technique and content. Entirely composed of paintings on public walls, sidewalks, and other spaces, it follows a creature as it undergoes a mindbending series of transformations - mating, mutating, and mitosing through multiarmed monsters, scuttling spiders, a herd of teeth, and more. Considerable visual wit is in evidence, as the paintings interact with their substrates - a trompe d'oeil brick falls out of a wall, pieces of paper are snatched with a froglike tongue, and hiding places are found in the corners of crumbling walls. Watching and re-watching it consumed way too much of my time today. (and it's CC-licensed - share and enjoy!)" Link (Thanks, Debcha!)

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DropBox

DropBox looks to be amongst a wave of applications offering real time sharing and syncing of files between computers. Reminiscent of the GDrive concept, but far more developed. The potential for collaboration is great.

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Cell Phone Spam

The New York Times recently covered a story that is not particularly new, but is a persistent problem for anyone with an email address or a cell phone. The problem is particular worse for the cell phone because you are paying for each one of those text messages. Sure you can request a credit as the article suggests but is the $0.15 to $0.20 you pay for the text message worth the hassle of explaining to the Customer Service Representative that the message is SPAM and you should be credited. The more prudent question should be how much control to consumers have over receiving text messages and from what sources, and what technology is available to help limit and control the amount of SPAM sent via text message. From the Article: "Cellphone spam is particularly annoying to its recipients because it is more invasive — announcing itself with a beep — and can be costly."
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StopBadWare.org

StopBadWare.org is a website devoted to helping protect and inform consumers with regards to programs that they download and use on their computers. The StopBadWare blog is a great ongoing report on what's going on in the world of spyware, and they keep data on problematic software to avoid.

From the site:

"StopBadware.org is a "Neighborhood Watch" campaign aimed at fighting badware. We will seek to provide reliable, objective information about downloadable applications in order to help consumers to make better choices about what they download on to their computers. We aim to become a central clearinghouse for research on badware and the bad actors who spread it, and to become a focal point for developing collaborative, community-minded approaches to stopping badware."

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