Propellerheads wont transfer REs. Is this legal?

[eusti]

It’s only fair to go after the big boys like Google, Microsoft and Apple first. Rather than small indie devs like Apple.

I believe Apple channels all their revenues through Ireland. They all have EU bases.

Is Apple small or indie for you now?

D.

[reggie1979]

I wish that they'd allow it, but in the end they don't, so I've gotten over it.

[aeox]

I had 30 days to really test and decide if a RE was worth buying, knowing that I can't resell. I've got no problems with that, personally.

Now that I think about it, I can't think of any REs that I regret buying/want to sell. Though ..if one simply needs the cash, I'd say one has bigger problems to worry about

¯\_(ツ)_/¯

[miscend]

It’s only fair to go after the big boys like Google, Microsoft and Apple first. Rather than small indie devs like Apple.

I believe Apple channels all their revenues through Ireland. They all have EU bases.

Is Apple small or indie for you now?

D.

That was a typo. It’s fixed now.

[gullum]

there is no info on the shop page that says you can't resell or anywhere in process of buying a RE. now they have Rent-to-Own if you can't sell it, it's not really yours is it.
I should not as a user need to search for info like this it should be presented to me and be easily understandable.
I don't plan to sell any of my RE's but I have not seen or read anywhere on PH shop that I can't resell that info I have gotten from here

[QVprod]

there is no info on the shop page that says you can't resell or anywhere in process of buying a RE. now they have Rent-to-Own if you can't sell it, it's not really yours is it.
I should not as a user need to search for info like this it should be presented to me and be easily understandable.
I don't plan to sell any of my RE's but I have not seen or read anywhere on PH shop that I can't resell that info I have gotten from here

I would agree that there should be a “I have read the terms” checkbox on the checkout page of the shop. As it is, that info is only easily available from the support page which most wont go to unless they have an issue. Otherwise it’s easily missed.

[MrFigg]

Well if they ever do allow us to sell REs then let it be known that I will sell both of those stupid DNALabs romplers to the first person who asks for the grand price of €zero. First come first served.

[miscend]

Well if they ever do allow us to sell REs then let it be known that I will sell both of those stupid DNALabs romplers to the first person who asks for the grand price of €zero. First come first served.

Is the 30 day demo not generous enough?

[VariableX]

Well if they ever do allow us to sell REs then let it be known that I will sell both of those stupid DNALabs romplers to the first person who asks for the grand price of €zero. First come first served.

I think you should live on the edge.
Set yourself the task of a complete song only using the two DNALabs REs.
You might be surprised, mix it up a bit ( no pun intended )

[MrFigg]

Well if they ever do allow us to sell REs then let it be known that I will sell both of those stupid DNALabs romplers to the first person who asks for the grand price of €zero. First come first served.

Is the 30 day demo not generous enough?

Sure. Try them for 30 days and if you like them you could get mine for free .

[MrFigg]

Well if they ever do allow us to sell REs then let it be known that I will sell both of those stupid DNALabs romplers to the first person who asks for the grand price of €zero. First come first served.

I think you should live on the edge.
Set yourself the task of a complete song only using the two DNALabs REs.
You might be surprised, mix it up a bit ( no pun intended )

I like your positive thinking man. Thanks for that.

[diminished]

Thanks for the input guys. Maybe this case is not so crystal clear... But I will open an claim on the EU dispute plattform.

Man this thread was hard to find again. Glad I was able to.

Any updates on the matter, gmd41?

[Loque]

Thanks for the input guys. Maybe this case is not so crystal clear... But I will open an claim on the EU dispute plattform.

Man this thread was hard to find again. Glad I was able to.

Any updates on the matter, gmd41?

If you want to change the world, i think you should start doing it by yourself

[diminished]

Man this thread was hard to find again. Glad I was able to.

Any updates on the matter, gmd41?

If you want to change the world, i think you should start doing it by yourself

I agree, and in the meantime I'll ask for updates on topics that affect all of us. Cool?

[fullforce]

Well if they ever do allow us to sell REs then let it be known that I will sell both of those stupid DNALabs romplers to the first person who asks for the grand price of €zero. First come first served.

Is the 30 day demo not generous enough?

"No 30 days is not enough because I had to walk my dog and take the car to the garage and do laundry and dishes and pick up the kids from school and all this stuff keeps getting in the way so I want 300 days at least"

[Proboscis]

Some time ago I discussed this with a lawyer friend. Granted, his area of expertise is not in the field of digital product licencing, but his view, based on the old ToS & EULA that we both sat down with to deconstruct, was that there would absolutely be a case to answer if one were to pursue it, and the precedent of the Oracle case was plenty to support an action against Propellerheads position. I'm only going by memory as it was a long time ago, but there was also a clause which could be interpreted as that if third party developers granted transfer, then Propellerhead would be obliged to comply. He also stated that it was a very poorly written ToS & EULA, with plenty of 'outs' for the consumer, and wondered if it were even written by a person with knowledge of contract law.

However, who here is going to commit time & resources to challenging their position ? I would be happy to sell half of my rack extensions, but dedicating so much to fighting for it makes no economic sense for what I would gain in $$ from selling them. There are bigger battles in society that we could spend our time rallying against

[diminished]

However, who here is going to commit time & resources to challenging their position ?

The EU has established tools to help the consumer in such instances, https://ec.europa.eu/consumers/odr/main ... how&lng=EN is what user gdm41 used.

There are bigger battles in society that we could spend our time rallying against

There's always a bigger battle.

[Proboscis]

Can't seem to find the old EULA on the wayback machine, but from the current one there are clauses that may be of interest to anyone pursuing this. I have truncated the contents to show only the relevent statements:

Third Party Product End User License Agreement

2. Copyright. The RE Product is owned by the Developer and/or its suppliers/licensors

3. No transfer. You may not transfer, rent, lease, or sublicense the RE Product (other than to the extent that such right is expressly granted under applicable mandatory law).

5. This License shall be governed by the laws of Sweden.

Place of jurisdiction is location of the Developer.

That last point seems contradictory, however if we challenge Verdane Capital, an EU company, and if any third party is also in an EU country (or any other country where similar laws of licence transfer are in place) and they grant permission to resell, then I think there's a possibility that RE's can be sold.

[gdm41]

If you want to change the world, i think you should start doing it by yourself

I agree, and in the meantime I'll ask for updates on topics that affect all of us. Cool?

Unfortunately not, the EU dispute platform is only voluntary for the seller and i had some more mails with PH. They stand on the point, that they are not violating the EU law.

I found this interesting wikipedia article:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First-sale_doctrine

"In Europe, the European Court of Justice ruled, on July 3, 2012, that it is indeed permissible to resell software licenses even if the digital good has been downloaded directly from the Internet, and that the first sale doctrine applied whenever software was originally sold to a customer for an unlimited amount of time, as such sale involves a transfer of ownership, thus prohibiting any software maker from preventing the resale of their software by any of their legitimate owners.[5][6][7] The court requires that the previous owner must no longer be able to use the licensed software after the resale, but finds that the practical difficulties in enforcing this clause should not be an obstacle to authorizing resale, as they are also present for software which can be installed from physical supports, where the first-sale doctrine is in force.[8][9] The ruling applies to the European Union, but could indirectly find its way to North America; moreover the situation could entice publishers to offer platforms for a secondary market.[6] In a notable case, the High Court of Paris found against Valve for not allowing the resale of games from the Steam digital storefront, requiring Valve to comply with the European Union Directives of first-sale doctrine within three months, pending appeals"

I am not a native english speaker, so its quite hard for me to understand these law texts... But from my point of view, PH have to allow reselling RE´s. I mean the same logic for selling a reason license must apply to the REs....

[tt_lab]

My point of view in this matter is that what PH is doing is bluntly going against the rules in EU. But as mentioned before who is going to go to court for this for a couple of hundreds of €. But the shitstorm is calling PH home. Because when someone would try to sell its reasonm license and 3000€ worth RE for lets say 2000€, maybe then it is profitable to get into a 500€ battle knowing that you're gonna beat PH in court thus they'd finish paying up your lawyer bills.
I don't think PH is doing this from a greed perspective, but from a lazy perspective of the work that they should be putting if people could sell their REs. Look at the mess they are doing anytime they have to change ther site for instance.
I love REs>than VSTs but I think it was a bad move from them to not go VST in the first place and forget about REs all together

[doze]

Maybe you can get Greta Thunberg, to strike and skip school for this...

[miscend]

Maybe you can get Greta Thunberg, to strike and skip school for this...

Unfortunately the climate isn't fixed yet. She still has more pressing matters to attend.

[Proboscis]

Maybe you can get Greta Thunberg, to strike and skip school for this...

She's too busy with her side project, a Swedish Black Gretal band

[orthodox]

Maybe you can get Greta Thunberg, to strike and skip school for this...

Unfortunately the climate isn't fixed yet. She still has more pressing matters to attend.

Anybody can grow himself into a Greta Thunberg.

[JiggeryPokery]

Let me state the obvious that I'm no fan of the way PH have set up the legal status as it is indeed very contradictory and it seems unlikely it would stand up to any scrutiny in any EU court by any competent barrister for the complainant for a couple of reasons. Of course they're going to say "Our EULA is great! It's the best EULA! Build the paywall!" if asked; they're hardly going to say "oh yes, that EULA is totally fucked, our bad! We'll get that fixed right now!" are they?

RE transfers, then. There are, I suspect, three variants: transfer through resale of individual REs, free gift transfers, and transfers of RE as part of Reason license transfers.

The latter first.

This is possible if one breaks the EULA and you hand over your entire account, passwords and all. It's the nuclear option, when you want to dump everything in RS on that account.

It has obvious risks, though, and requires advanced planning from the seller, and the buyer hoping that RS don't spot the switch and firebomb the account. I expect it has been done successfully, and it's likely doable if one really wishes to give everything up and both parties are above reproach.

However, since multiple licenses for Reason and other RS products can be held under one user account, it's not viable in any case you don't want to dump the entire ecosystem. You might want to sell a full Reason 11 license but hang on to, say, that cheap Reason 11 Lite you picked up to use as a VST. Chances are you'll still want your REs in the Reason Lite. I don't doubt the excuse for tying REs to accounts rather than Reason licenses is at least partly so RS can avoid the potential massive e-paperwork involved (I'll get to this later), because there's no technical reason an account-holder shouldn't be able to request the Reason license and all REs be transferred, and be left with just Reason 11 Lite, let alone request transfer of a selection of REs (which is probably risky anyway as the new license holder might just end up with the "crap" REs the transferrer just wanted to be shot of anyway), plus it means RS (and as a convenient side-effect, the original developer) can potentially earn on the new Reason-license holder buying some of the same REs as the original license-holder did.

The second approach was Gifting, e.g. "Hey Props, I've got this old Skelton device, can you please just give it to Bob's Account"? Nope. NI would fuck them hard again if they did this. "But what about just devices that are legitimate?" Nope, some of those aren't on sale anymore either. "OK, so just devices that are still on sale, then?" Nope. Too much like hard work for no financial benefit. And Support would still have to keep explaining to people trying to sell devices not on sale that they only sell devices on sale, and that's too much like hard work.

So the final method, regarding individual RE transfers, e.g. RE resales. I understand the sentiment, but genuinely, think about what you're asking for here from a practical perspective.

With the potential amount of people who will try to resell stuff at this point, I'm not convinced there's a big enough third party market to actually justify it.

Consider that all those who bought whatever they now hate at €89—or worse, never liked but still impulse-bought for a tenner, because ... bargain, obvs!—they're not all going suddenly be taken off your hands for $30. Let's be brutally honest: with the way these things work it will not so much an equal race as a windswept plummet to the bottom—everything on an official RE resale shop or informally via a forum (in which case the transfer process would effectively come under "Gifting" above, GLWT, ) will be €9 or less by the end of the first month.

And assuming it's an official resale process via PropShop, when it's certain the minimum price would still be €9: how is that revenue split? 25% VAT is automatic. And from what's left 30% would go to RS—no chance they'd give up the opportunity for another 30% on a resale. For IDT/GE devices uJam would get another 20% I suppose unless uJam's contract only covered first sale. So that's well under €4 left. Does the dev, assuming that could be contractually worked out, get a reasonable cut of the resale? If so, how much is that RE worth now to the seller? At best you'll get around 40% of the sale price if devs don't get a share, perhaps you'll make as much as €1.95 turn on your original €89 purchase if they do!

But you'll be up against 100 other people trying to shift the same thing that only only a handful of people might be interested in even at the minimum price.

(I don't recall anything about resales contractually for RE devs, now I think about it. In theory then that setup would be like RS operating as reseller like a second-hand record or bookstore: the original creator wouldn't get a second payment, but after VAT the split would be 50/50 between RS and the RE seller; they couldn't offer more than 50% because it opens a nasty can of worms regarding new content creators, e.g. "Wait: you give RE resellers 70% but new content creators only 50%? WTF?").

Right or wrong, my view is regardless of whether "no transfers of REs" is legal or not, I don't think it matters enough to be beneficial to anyone. Purely from a practical perspective it's a non-starter. I'm unclear about the mechanics of reselling plugins of other formats where a license is also ostensibly tied to email account, someone with experience can perhaps elucidate on the matter, but RE appears to be little like the potential for resale of licenses in other formats. Mostly the licenses are for plugins that have multiple formats handled by one installer, so a VST user reselling a pricey plugin license on the [relatively] cheap, is also offering that license for every other format that that product installer can handle (VST/AU/AAX/RTAS etc), meaning the potential buyer market is wider. I can't see Reason Plugin VST or AU users rushing to pickup any desperate adverts of second-hand Heavocity REs, any more than I can see an equal number of users of the full Reason doing so.