Microsoft is losing the battle to protect license lucre. It better get used to the feeling
Time for the Clone Wars remake
OPINION In Disney movies, if you wish really, really hard for what you want, it happens. In British courts, not so much. Prince Redmondia really, really wanted to stop the evil barons from reselling on-prem Office and Windows licenses, and made a fairy tale argument in court to make it so. Our hero did not get its wish, not then, and not now with the UK Court of Appeals.
The traditional reason companies dislike reseller markets is the obvious one that they don’t get any revenue. The law, however, has an even more traditional take on this: that once you’ve bought something you can do what you like with it. Is this true for software licenses? In Europe, explicitly yes. So Microsoft made the novel argument that its Office's suite's icons and help files made it a creative work that deserved copyright protection. For...
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