Discount-Licensing Limited Blog

Software buyers are vulnerable to exploitation due to the demise of traditional user groups combined with aggressive sales targets.

The ‘Barium Manifesto’ back in December stated the need to ‘Shake things up’ in the software licensing industry and create an industry regulator.

Further to last month’s landmark Court Judgement of the CJEU against Oracle (Case C-128/11 - 3 rd July 2012), in which the legalities of second-hand software licensing was re-affirmed, a district court of Hamburg (Germany) has subsequently issued a temporary injunction against Microsoft - Court Reference: 327 O 396/12 (9th August 2012): ITExpresso.de - “Gebrauchtsoftware: Schlappe für Microsoft bei Aufspaltung von Volumenlizenzen“. Find out more here.

The EU court has decided that distribution rights end when and at the specific time that the original copyright holder (in this case Oracle) markets and then completes a sale of the software on what is denoted as one “material medium” or another including a CD-ROM, a DVD or through an Internet download. Find out more here.

Some Partner Connect attendees and exhibitors this year were more creative in their approach than others. Fleur Doidge reviews the show.

Software giants plans could speed up UK business failure and piracy rates, warn onlookers

Most of the innovators and me-too competitors that have emerged over the past decade have worked in relative harmony with the software vendors in what has become a fragmented secondary software licence industry; an industry, which now incorporates numerous markets defined by the different software vendors (Microsoft, SAP etc), vendor’s products and licence platforms (Volume, OEM, boxed products etc); and each vendor offering different transfer provisions that continuously change. Find out more here.

Microsoft's volume licensing websites have been offline for over a week while the software giant has been tweaking its service.

I first came across Discount Licensing back in 2005 when they were introducing the concept of reselling licence agreements for insolvent companies. If a company were to go bust they could salvage some value from the agreements for the administrators.

Noel Unwin is a founder and Director of Discount-Licensing.com Ltd, formerly known as Disclic Ltd. For those of you whom have not heard of either, our company was formed over 5 years ago in order to investigate and create a secondary Microsoft software licensing market. Whilst being an authorised Microsoft reseller and registered partner, our main focus is to realise a residual value from disused Microsoft software licences from insolvent, as well as solvent companies, with a view to marketing and supplying legitimate software licence savings for small, medium and large businesses worldwide. Find out more here.