UK suit over reselling surplus Microsoft licenses rolls on Microsoft's attempts to have a 2021 lawsuit's claims regarding anti-competitive practices struck out were this week contested in UK courts. During the hearing on March 30-31, counsel for ValueLicensing requested Microsoft's applications be dismissed. While the software giant appeared to accept that there were issues around …
>Are you referring to the American ex-colonies that actually stuck
>to the older correct spellings, by any chance?
I suspect the reference was to the many inhabitants of the American ex-colonies who invent language on the fly because they haven't learned (or learnt) vocabulary, grammar and punctuation very well.
The Wikipedia 'Nucular' entry has been entertaining for a while. It appeared during Dubbya's time, and had substantial content justifying it (alternative facts?), although it stopped short of discussing whether atoms have a nucleus or a nuculus.
Perhaps the latter word is too close to incubus, which would probably upset many of the same people who are upset by the wicked witchcraft embedded in Harry Potter stories. (Halloween, on the other hand... money... good...)
The Wikipedia article started to attract discussion about the global entertainment value of US language misuse. Then it disappeared for a while. Now it's back, though in a milder version than at the peak of nuculositiness. Its future is probably a known unknown.
If the older spellings were stuck to by the ex-colonies, why did Webster come along and change the spelling of a lot of them for his dictionary? Apart from them being simpler to spell that is...
Please God, for once, don't let me have made a spelling mistake which, of course, I won't see until after editing time has ended.
English had many spelling revisions over the centuries - often with misguided judgements. Eg "could" is apparently a corruption of "coud" by a cleric who thought it ought to be grouped with "would".
There were major attempts in the UK to standardise spelling ca. 17th century. By that time English speakers had colonised other continents and retained some previous spellings - to which they then added their own revised ones.
Interesting mention of El Reg.
I don't know whether it's just me, but of late I think I've noticed omission in technology news which, once, El Reg would have been certain to have had a timely article about. I've even found things on the BBC 'Technology' news first. (It was the dumbing-down of that BBC section that first led to a search and discovery of El Reg).
E.g. Having recently seen an article entitled 'Facebook users angry after accounts locked for no reason' (https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-60959811) I came to this site for deeper analysis and found nothing. Maybe I missed it, but a search still doesn't show anything.
@smeagolberg
You are not the only one to think same. I never read anything here about these articles.
https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2022/03/samsung-caught-throttling-10000-phone-apps-and-its-own-home-screen/
https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2022/03/samsung-says-app-throttling-is-for-heat-management-will-let-users-disable-it/
Of course it it had been about Apple or Microsoft…
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I'm a Brit, but have been living in the States for about a decade. Honestly, these days I'm starting to lose track of which spelling is which, and I find myself mentally switching gears when I talk to friends back in the UK ("I just used the phrase 'my cellphone was dead'... oh, bother, I should have said, 'my mobile was flat'..."). That said, why on earth should The Register standardise on American spellings? That's insane! I wouldn't expect the BBC to do so, or the Telegraph, or any other UK-based publications. Has El Reg been bought up by Halliburton or Fox News without us knowing?? Is our beloved Vulture now a Bald Eagle? Or has the editorial team simply been locked into using Microsoft Word 265 with only the US English dictionary installed?
When they say Cloud, they mean Azure, as you cant take subscription licences to any other cloud.
Any company who is tempted to give up those perpetual licences for temporarily discounted subscriptions will realise that they give up the right to bring their licences to GCP/AWS/OVH, locking them into on-prem or Azure.
Even better - American company sues a British non-profit organisation with no presence in America in an American court. US judge allows the case to proceed despite the British organisation pointing out that the court has no jurisdiction, and subsequently awards a damages to the US company (which, BTW, it never collects and eventually collapses).
See Spamhaus vs e360
That's not quite what happened. e360 appealed the minimal ($27k) damage award from the original trial, presumably through greed, then snatched defeat from the jaws of victory when the appeal court basically lost its patience with their carry on and revised damages down to $3.
It could also come back to bite them
From the article "Microsoft Ireland is the entity through which the company grants licenses in the UK and EEA."
The UK could theoretically impose import taxes on those "goods" coming from the EU since they are a "third country" from our perspective. Just as the EU like to keep reminding the UK :-) I wonder how long it would take MS to suddenly allocate MSUK as the source of MS licenses to UK customers?
(No, I wasn't in favour of Brexit, but it's something we all have to make the best of nowadays)
I'd not be surprised to find that sort of licencing transfer is not covered at all yet. It's only become a growth industry during the time we were in the EU and wasn't an issue at all. Now we out of the EU, it could be a significant trade issue. It's might be on the radar now thanks to the "IP transfer" shenangans of the likes of Starbucks, Amazon et al claiming their "sales" take place in other countries and "rental" payments for Trademarks and so on eats all their profits. MS and other software licencing payments "import taxes" may get rolled into any future legislation to close those loopholes.
It is my opinion that all software is tied to the user and never to the hardware.
It is my opinion that all software is to be owned, never leased, with subscriptions only allowed for security products that require daily updates, i.e. antivirus software.
It is my opinion that all software must have a fully transferable product key and may never be connected to any personal information at any time. The product key may be transferred or resold to anyone without the permission of the original company as long as the original owner is no longer using the product.
It is my opinion that if a software vendor allows you to download their product at any time, then that vendor must allow you to re-download as many times as needed forever, even if support for the product has ended.
And I agree with this but having had to sort out this mess for several friends who bought "Perpetual" Office licenses, only to discover that when they tried to install them on a replacement laptop, they could not be activated. Calls to Microsoft to attempt to resolve if basically went down the route of "the software is not genuine".
Further follow up with they shysters that sold the license elicited that it could only be activated once on a single PC. I was doubtful at the start as when one of the licenses was originally purchased there had been issues activating as it was supposedly already in use. That did activate after going through the MS phone service. Nothing on there website had any information that it could only be activated once on one PC.
So is Microsoft right to take this action?
I think yes and no. Why should a company be able to resell something that has already been used and they probably did not pay for in the first place? If the license is linked to the original purchaser, then yes. The company reselling the used software is doing it with something they don't own.
On the other hand, their stance on licensing is becoming increasingly challenging and more expensive and they are aggressively trying to stamp out perpetual licensing. Now that could be seen as anti-competitive and probably should be investigated. That said, subscription is the way software is going and at that point it is very definitely linked to a single user in perpetuity. Of course the perpetuity is as long as you continue to pay.
There is no option to resell anything that is a subscription.
As an addendum to your comment. Lifehacker had news the other day of a pretty tempting offer - a permanent licence to Office 2021 (or whatever the current non-subscription version is) for only $50, compared to the usual pricing of $400 or so. Despite my well-documented aversion to Office, I admit I was tempted. However, the small print revealed that it was for one PC only. Now it's not that I ever intended to cheat and install it on every PC in my household, but I do change/upgrade my primary PC fairly frequently, and I could tell from the small print and Microsoft's general go-fuck-yourself attitude that as soon as I upgraded my PC, my "permanent" licence would be $50 thrown down the drain. At least with Windows in years passim it was possible, albeit painful, to argue and cajole the telephone activation helpdesk into allowing transfer of a licence to a new motherboard...
So I passed. And your comment leaves me feeling vindicated.
A British company sues a US company in an English court over the US company's trading practices in the UK. THE US company unilaterally decided the case should be heard in an Irish court.
Is the US company not aware that trading in the UK is not governed by Irish or EU law? Does the US company think it's a good idea not only to question the jurisdiction of the English court, but to openly state that the English court should refer the case to a court in a foreign country?
They must surely realise that all they are likely to do is rile the court. Furthermore they must surely realise that were they to succeed in moving the case to a court within the EU then they would very definitely succeed in pissing off the UK government. None of the above is likely to endeer them to the UK government the next time they are legislating in anything to do with software and licences. Oh and of course taxing foreign companies who use the EU as a base to trade in the UK, which I'm sure has nothing to do with avoiding taxes in the UK.
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