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He doesn't have to.
First your scenario is not the situation he had to decide on and second the scenario includes an illegal act on behalf of User A, i.e. this has already been taken care of by law.

The fact that the judge narrowly scoped his decision is a reason why people have very little faith in the judicial system to solve real problems.



It's not "taken care of by the law". When was the last time you heard about prosecution of illegal use of software?

Easily solved by noting that any sale of software either has to explicitly state that it is either just the license, just the media or both. What you are talking about is piracy - an individual has one licence and entitled to install one copy per licence. If the seller continues to use the software after selling, and unless explicitly stated in the sale, the assumption is that the licence has been transferred and the seller has no right to continue using it.

Using Autodesk logic - no music cd's should be able to get sold either given you can easily copy a cd then sell it. You could say the same thing about DVD's as well - claiming they can't be resold. There are many things that would be impacted if they did allow Autodesk's position to stand.

Oh, and Autodesk should curl up in a corner and die; how long must Mac users wait for them to finally get off their ass and produce a Mac version of their software? if not for their clusterf--k treatment of customers that I despise them, its for their refusal to acknowledge Mac users demand for their product - are they hell bent on entrenching the Windows monopoly further through their refusal to port to Mac OS X?

That's not really an easy solution, and is what lead to the problem in the first place.

Software manufacturers generally loathe existing copyright laws, because they offer protections to the people that purchase their software, impacting their business model in the same way that other content providers have had to deal with for the last century or so. They don't want to be classified in the same category as media providers, such as book publishers or record companies, because the law is established in most jurisdictions with legal precedents. If you buy a book or a music CD, you can resell it. It's an argument that was settled back in the days of printing presses and phonographs, and they hate that.

Software companies believe that they should be allowed to rent software under their own conditions with a one-time perpetual rental fee. They don't want their content protected under copyright law, they want it protected under contract law, and frankly, the big guys are lobbying the try and merge the two.

The problem is that when laws were established, and precedents set decades ago, the digital age was far beyond what anyone could anticipate. Software companies are providing creative works that fall under the pervue of copyright law, no matter how they try to slice it. There is absolutely nothing that fundamentally differentiates a collection of code comprising an application, from a collection of words that comprises a book, or a collection of sounds that comprise a musical work.

If software companies want to license software with restrictions that bypass any provisions of copyright law, such as fair use, then they should just start charging a monthly fee for it and see how well that flies in the market place. If they want to charge a one-time fee for perpetual use, yet try to apply restrictions that bypass consumer rights in a given jurisdiction, then they'll need to deal with it in the courts.

Allowing them to decide for themselves what the condition of sale should be is a bit ridiculous. Autodesk tried to do that, and the court shot them down. The nice thing about legal rights is that the law generally prevents you from forfeiting them, regardless of the amount of legalese companies may try to apply in license agreements. For example, the right of first doctrine (the underlying precedent in this particular case) was originally established in a case involving a publisher including text in a book the forbade customers from reselling it, something like 100 years ago. A few more decisions like this in various jurisdictions will hopefully help settle this question once and for all...

Just my 2+ c....

Here's a scenario that bothers me. Let's say User A installs a copy of AutoCAD on his machine, and then turns around and sells the physical media to User B. User A continues to use the AutoCAD installed on his machine. User B installs AutoCAD, and likewise starts to use the software. This is a wrinkle that the judge doesn't seem to have considered. He's looking at this case purely as a sale of physical media.

I have no idea how it is there in the US, but here in Finland it is seen as a copyright infringement if you keep copies of the software while still selling the original media away. You are allowed to sell the media but you must either include all backup copies or destroy them, including any installed copies.