The software ownership discussion….

This past week on This Week in Tech (TWIT) the topic of software ownership came up. The story is around the case Vernor v. Autodesk in which a man purchased used copies of AutoCad at an office sale with the product keys. He then tried to sell them on Ebay, and AutoDesk asked Ebay to take down the auctions repeatedly. The man then sued to get the sales declared legal.

The court interpretation of the EULA upheld AutoDesk’s claim that the sales were in violation of the agreement. This, of course opens a can of worms that should have been left closed. If software manufacturers and media companies had their way, any time you were done with their product, you would send back the media for them to destroy them.

This argument comes down to weather or not you own the software or media that you buy, or are you just “renting” it. Some think that if you don’t really own a game when you buy it the costs are too high for games. This line of thought also hurts the largest game retailer in the US, GameStop. Their entire business model was built on the used game market, and everyone’s desire to save a few bucks. I’m not going to go in to the merits of their business practices now, but there is some value to the games industry that they provide.

Consider that someone buys an Xbox360 late in the console cycle. You of course would want to build a library of games to play at a lower cost. You may pick up earlier titiles that have new sequels coming out currently. Those earlier games may sell newer game titles. That is of course hypothical, but it is one example of a potential benefit.

A major success story is Valve’s Steam service. It gives the software publishers control and rights management of their games, and a convienient method for media delivery. It’s a great way to keep older titles in front of consumers and continue to genereate revenue for game developers. Valve also does a great job of shaking up prices by running frequent sales on individual titles and bundles of  titles at deep discount. This week the Star Wars software collection is on sale for $49.99US. Well over $150.00 of software for $50.

There will eventually be a middle ground in this battle. For now, speak with you wallet, and show these businesses what you think!