The vile, anti-customer shrinkwrap licenses that are universal in software have started showing up in hardware; particularily, jig-makers are requiring those who buy their templates to aver that they will not loan, sell or allow re-use of the templates they buy.
This is revolting: it comes down to the idea of expecting the world to pay your living, even though your business isn’t sustainable. Copyright doesn’t give you the right to restrict sale and lending of your works, but it does give you the power to shrinkwrap all of the copies of your work with a contract that claws back all of the public’s rights in copyright, including the first sale right that enables reselling and so forth.
This is an abuse of copyright, plain and simple, and the manufacturer’s claim that:
“…the purpose of the TemplateMaster is to clone itself. Therefore we are verifying your honesty that only you will use the tool and you will not be passing it around to others to use for free. It is exactly the same as the ‘shrink wrap’ agreement that comes with almost all computer software. Please help us fight ‘tool piracy’.”
is outrageous: we’re chosen to get into a business that is tenuous and unsustainable. Therefore, we demand that you surrender your rights and legitimate expectations about what you may do with the goods that you lawfully acquire in order to ensure that we can keep our doors open.
(via /.)