Software Industry Lobbies Against EU Consumer Rights Laws
Linked by Thom Holwerda on Mon 7th Mar 2011 23:21 UTC
Legal Well, how about some positive news to end this day? How about annoying the heck out of the Business Software Alliance? There's a new proposal for a directive on consumer rights in the EU, and in it, digital goods - software, online services, and so on - are explicitly defined as goods that are no different than any other good - like bread, watches, or cars. In other words, you would suddenly own the copies of software you buy, effectively declaring the EULA as a worthless piece of paper. Surprise - the BSA is not happy about this.
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RE[2]: Flawed analogy
by WorknMan on Tue 8th Mar 2011 02:02 UTC in reply to "RE: Flawed analogy"
WorknMan
Member since:
2005-11-13

And there is the issue of open source software. Unless there is an exception, this effectively kills the "release early, release often" cycle.


Yeah, I was wondering what this would mean for FOSS, or even free (as in beer) software. Would you really want to release something for free in the wild if you knew that Joe Sixpack could sue you if it wrecks his computer somehow?

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