🚀 go-pugleaf

I suspect that your experience followed what would be the law in most 
cases - the original seller of OEM software may well have breached their 
agreement with MS about how they could sell that software, but that is not 
your problem as a purchaser - you are entitled to own and use it, and 
(possibly) even sell it.   But note that I have assumed we are talking about 
legally produced copies of genuine MS software - as soon as you talk pirated 
copies there's a whole new ball game happening.

I know of several cases where a large volume of OEM product was sold, 
presumably in breach of the original agreement with MS, when a re-seller was 
being liquidated.  At one auction I attended the auctioneer spelled out 
exactly that condition - the product was genuine and the licenses were 
valid, but (considering the terms and conditions under which it had been 
originally provided) the legal situation for anyone trying to re-sell it was 
not clear.  Then he spent the same amount of time explaining that his 
comments were not to be taken as a definitive statement of the law and could 
not be relied on!
-- 
Jeff Richards
MS MVP (Windows - Shell/User)
"Lewis K. Zeelastik" <lewzeelastik@yahoo.com> wrote in message 
news:QZivm.43196$ze1.27400@news-server.bigpond.net.au...
> snip <
>
> Back in the late 1990s heaps of US Ebay customers were selling MS Office 
> 97 Professional. They were selling them on Dutch auctions and usually had 
> large numbers available. Anyway, I bid on and won six copies. They were 
> all sealed and came with the installation licence number (or whatever you 
> call it). I loaded one onto my machine and it worked fine. I then 
> advertised the other five copies in the local newspaper. About a week or 
> so later I was raided by about six or seven police officers. They seized 
> the five copies and said they would contact me later (I had told them 
> where and when I bought them and that hundred of people were selling them 
> and buying them and that to my knowledge they were genuine original 
> copies). About a year went by and then I was summoned to appear in the 
> magistrate's court. To cut a long story short, the Magistrate dismissed 
> the case as being frivolous and time wasting. The Magistrate said that any 
> layman would just naturally assume that they were genuine copies and that 
> included him. This was after the MS representative gave a long monologue 
> about the lengthy in-depth training MS staff underwent to spot 
> "illegal/pirated copies of software".  The MS rep also said that even if 
> the software was genuine, it would be classified as being OEM and that it 
> was against the law to sell OEM without the accompanying equipment 
> (computer I guess). The Magistrate smiled and said as far as he was 
> concerned, as long as the "OEM" software was legally obtained it became 
> the property of the buyer and he/she owned it and therefore, could do what 
> the heck they wanted with it. One of my arguments was how come Ebay or MS 
> didn't spot the (literally) hundreds of sellers of the supposedly 
> illegal/pirated/OEM software.
> To my knowledge the software was legal and original and I guess OEM, as 
> all it consisted of was the disk in a sealed case with the installation 
> key and installation instructions.
> I heard later that several other people went through what I did with the 
> same end result.
> Amen!!
>