yeah as far as i know for software, oem is the full version but with limited capability if yoiur system goes horribly wrong, as in you have to re-install it. then - if you've bought a oem system you'll see - you have basically a disk that is just a recovery disk rather than being able to use it completly again.....not 100% about that but thats my understanding of it.
Nah, that's just the end result that you get if you buy it off someone like Dell who don't want to give you the full disk so they can prevent uneducated end users from truely messing up their system/charge a fortune for a simple fix/to stop you installing it on other systems in breach of the OEM license*. The OEM version is full but with a restricted license.Originally Posted by freddie
*Delete as cynicism dictates.
Last edited by Salazaar; 27-01-2008 at 12:00 PM.
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Dell have been giving bog-standard disks with their systems for at least 6 months now. Certainly all the Vostro's come with a stock branded Vista DVD, without all the crap you'd normally associate with large OEM systems. Acer are moving more and more towards using recovery partitions (without any form of recovery CD/DVD, or even for drivers), placing the responsibility firmly on the end-user to create their own recovery disks if they wish, and no means of recovery if you don't (unless you purchase separately of course).
Cat among the pigeons time, but as far as Im concerned, I buy an oem variant of XP/Vista/Any MS OS for just ONE pc - and by that I mean buy as an OS for one base unit, regardless of how many hardware upgrades it has.
Now that may well be against the terms of the license agreement, but thats just tough afaik. I wont ever try and put an oem copy on two machines (ie desktop and laptop), but if I upgrade to a new mobo and cpu I sure as hell will re-use my vista disk/key on it, retail or not.
It'd be like buying a new TV/dvd player and having to buy all your dvd's again. Not gonna happen. Retail has NO justification costing more than oem afaik.
Besides, my vista oem disk had two stickers top and bottom that said once broken (to get at the disk) i had agreed to abide by their license agreement.....a quick glance at the disk on my desk, and the carefully cut open outer box edge and central area on the dvd box, complete with the intact seals, tells me that I didnt agree to their frankly rediculous terms.
It may not be right, but thats my stance. At least I bought the OS in the first place, and buy one disk/key per system....why should I not have it for the systems lifetime?
Inspiring and appropriate:
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I agree with what you have said 100%.
you did not buy, and do not own, windows. you bought a license to use it, and some media. that's why it's such a hairy topic
ok, substitute the word OS for the word license, the point remains the same - afaik I have paid for the right to use the OS, regardless of ownership, on ONE base unit, regardless of upgrades.
semantics dont change that.
And as and when this becomes a problem for MS - they will just deactivate your License remotely (assuming you have an internet connection when they detect that you have broken the terms of the licence. Not happening (yet) but perfectly possible technically - and they would be within their rights to do so if you have broken the terms of the agreement. You will find that simply by installing and activating the software you have agreed to the terms, regardless of whether the seals are intact or not.
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True, but when they stoop that low other actions will be taken. Plus, unless they come to my house they wont know if I have changed my specs or not, the folks on the phone never ask....
They arent the only OS out there, so they will have to make a choice - they chose to reduce their outrageous costs for their retail OS licenses in countrys with high piracy, and they still rake in billions of dollars....
Not "AFAIK" as you are posting here with complete awareness that what you are doing is against the terms of the license - you mean "as far as I am concerned", but regardless it makes no difference how you want to interpret how (in your opinion) it should be, the fact remains the same.
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Indeed it should and it does, hence the full sentence.
"Calling other members "fool" <insert additional clause> is not going to go down well."
But to pick on an ex-mod, long-term friend of the site's owner and one of our longest and best-known posters to insult IS going to stand out. But I would, and have, said the same thing when someone who's been here for a handle of posts gets insulted. There is simply no need to go about treating people that way, and it will ONLY provoke argument.
Incidentally, I knew someone would pick that up. I just wondered who.
According to what I was told, yes. The motherboard is the "core" of the machine. Strictly speaking, if it fails and is replaced, MS will re-activate. If you've just decided to upgrade an old out-of-date machine for a new quad-core, then it's a "new" machine, and the OEM licence died with the old one. Quite what they do if the mobo has failed, and because you have to replace it, you've used the opportunity to do a cost-effective upgrade (or simply can't get a mobo of the same/similar spec to the failed one any more) is a grey area as far as I'm concerned.
Indeed it would, and neither am I. But there have been a number of "licence" cases that have gone through the courts, though not in quite this situation, that I would have suspected would fail, and didn't.....
It would be interesting to see the licence under scruitiny in the courts, I'm not certain it would stand up all that well in the sort of circumstances we're all talking about (i.e. home build upgraders), which may be why MS don't seem to be taking too tough a stance on enforcing it. Or maybe they just don't give a crap when you compare the scale of this sector to the 'real' OEM and retail sectors.
A friend of mine is a solicitor specialising in IP law. Years ago, he also wrote and sold a PC utility. I read the licence and it restricted this and that. I asked him if that licence was actually enforceable in UK courts because, as I understood it, you can't unilaterally make conditions on any contract after it's been made. As the licence is inside the box, and by the time you can see it exists let alone what it said, the contract has already been made.
His answer was that he didn't know if it was enforceable or not - there are legal arguments both ways. But what was certain was that you couldn't enforce what you didn't put in it.
Since then, there have certainly been cases which suggests licences are indeed enforceable though, as I said, I've not seen anything quite relating to this. It doesn't mean they haven't happened, though.
It may say in the EULA that you cant transfer the OS to another machine or use the
same key in a machine with a replaced mobo but it doesnt necessarily mean that they
can legally restrict you in this way.
Selling OEM Windows copies – you can do it in Europe | The Register
Salazaar (27-01-2008)
While this may be the case I certainly wouldn't like to be the test case. My balls just aren't big enough to take on Microsoft's lawyers, and frankly I feel the restriction imposed on OEM licensing are entirely reasonable.
Oh yikes.
I completely agree that there is no guarantee that just because the EULA says it, it's legally enforceable. It also doesn't mean it isn't. In relation to that article, the distribution right was intended to relate to controlling the resale of physical goods in which there was IP rights - such as the Silhouette case. It was about market segmentation, and whether you can buy Levi jeans in the Far East and then import them into prime markets and resell.
Also, the EU directive referenced in that article makes clear that the clause used is subject to other contractual terms. Next, that EU directive has NO force of law in the UK. It binds member states to implement national legislation. So you'd have thought that the author of the article would have referred to the domestic legislation, wouldn't you.
Finally, the argument (and this has been successfully made in courts, though it's not entirely clear whether it'll hold) is that while that might apply to selling a boxed copy of software and trying to control the resale, you are in a very different situation when a user has accepted the EULA by installing the software, and there've been a number of cases where (somewhat to my surprise) it has been held that users are bound by the EULA in that way. So does the exhaustion of distribution rights (sometimes called first sale doctrine) apply? Dunno .... but I doubt it.
Salazaar (27-01-2008)
I sympathise with your attitude. I certainly wouldn't presume to tell you what you should or shouldn't do on your PCs. It's none of my business. As a mod, I also don't have a problem with you saying it. I certainly don't have a problem with people saying they disagree with some or all of the implications of copyright law. God knows, I disagree with some of it myself.
When it comes to people advising others on how to break the law, copyright or not, that's where HEXUS has a problem, and we'd step in. But this thread hasn't gone there ... or just barely.
But the crunch is in your last line. What you bought was a right to use the OS, and the physical media, packaging, etc. And you do indeed have a right to use it for the "lifetime" of the system. The question is, how to you define that lifetime?
I've got an old 386 box here. If I replace the motherboard, processor, memory, hard drive, optical drive, floppy, graphics card, sound card, power supply, keyboard, mouse and monitor .... is it still the original system? Not really. It's just the original case ..... and the system doesn't even actually need the case to run at all - it's just a box to house it in. So somewhere along that upgrade path the system has ended it's lifetime .... and the OS licence with it.
vrykyl (27-01-2008)
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