Recently I saw these two links:
The price difference is huge. It seems that the price is so low because:
The software which we selling was bought primarily at auctions and from companies that have gone out of business.
Anybody knows if this is legal?
Thank you
The answer is sometimes. This is from the Microsoft Word EULA:
Transfer to Third Party. If you are the person who initially licensed the Software, you may make a one-time permanent transfer of this EULA, Software and Certificate of Authenticity (if applicable) to another end user, provided that you do not retain any copies of the Software.
This clearly states that transfer is allowed. Other packages will be different. AutoCad, for example, has a very restrictive transfer EULA.
I see the bigger issue is that the seller may not have rights to transfer the license. Some software companies claim that the 'discount' seller is not an authorized reseller and therefore the transaction (and license transfer) is not valid.
Caveat emptor!
There has been big debates in the UK (in trade magazines) about companies who purchase licenses when companies go bankrupt / have huge stockpiles and selling them off cheap. The companies who built the software do not like it and are saying not legal, and the companies who are selling it saying it is just another good being sold on.
That being said, the fact that the website you are showing looks like a off the shelf template, and the prices seem to be very low, I would personally say that it looks like a bit of a scam and will probably be pirate copies. - that being said, some of their prices look genuine - I have honestly no idea about this shop.
Taking a look at details, http://www.robtex.com/dns/download-journal.com.html They seem to have many shops that they are "linked" to.
Again, unless someone has bought from them (and I can not find any reviews) I would personally lean towards scam.
"Denied Access Policy ...the site is in the following content filtering categories: Shopping;Illegal/Questionable" so someone thinks it's dodgy.
– pelms Aug 27 '09 at 16:49Anybody knows if this is legal?
This depends very much on the jurisdiction; there is no globally valid answer.
The core point is that software is never sold, always licensed. Software companies generally try to make these licenses as restrictive as possible, but many countries have laws that make such restrictions invalid, especially when they involve end users (because allowing arbitrarily nasty hidden license terms would cripple daily business operations).
I know that, for example, German law basically allows the resale of software licenses, no matter what the license terms say, even if done commercially. I'm pretty sure it's different in the USA, and different again in the UK.
It depends on the country where you live, the country where download-journal.com is located and the country where the software originates from. Also, the site is not sending you any CD/DVD or whatever but provides you just a download. They could have cracked the software and generated fake registration keys or maybe did some other nasty things to it. Plus, quoting the site itself: Because we offer only download copies of licensed versions. This means that you will not receive any printed documentation (licensing or instructions) - just files and instructions in .txt format, and will not be able to register this software online. All updates (for most of the software) are available to you. The software which we selling was bought primarily at auctions and from companies that have gone out of business.
So maybe you're just sharing the license with a couple of hundreds of other people, which would be illegal.
If you ask my opinion then this is illegal, even though they're denying this...
