11 Feb
2003
11 Feb
'03
5:28 a.m.
Regarding the CDs I can say flat out for sure the
intellectual property
owner can shut down any sales and get pretty nasty along with it.
Not normally.
Case
in point a CD plant goes belly up and somebody buys a pallet of CDs.
Turns out in the pallet of misc there are several hundred Apple Dealer
Service CDs with diagnostic software and fully installable OS for all
recent machines. Shortly after some bozo bought one and tried to
register it with Apple, the Apple Lawyers were all over the poor guy
selling them.
If they were made under contract to Apple, they are Apple property and
shouldn't have been sold at the liquidation. So they may legally be
stolen property. This is a general problem, not a copyright issue.
This is MUCH different from the more common case where the publisher
scraps a pallet of finished goods, or a distributor or dealer does.
In such a case, the publisher may attempt to suppress sales, but has
no legal ground to do so.
If the publisher is smart about how they scrap stuff, they can
contractually require the buyer to destroy the material. In that case,
if the buyer resells the CDs, the buyer (but not the end user) is liable
for damages.
Auctions make for some weird issues. Leased equipment
gets sold, all
sorts of snafu.
Which is why leasing companies that are smart affix labels to leased
equipment saying things like "Subject to a security interest in favor
of and/or owned by <name of leasing company> <address> <phone
number>"
(seen on one of our laser printers at work). However, there are many
leasing companies that don't do this, which is mind-boggling.