Software business practice

[Guest mikealpha]

I have a question. A few years ago I bought a bunch of old airplane manuals (DC-6, DC-8, L-1049 and the like) on CD from a US company called eflightmanuals ( www.eflightmanuals ). They have send them to Germany and the pdfs were protected and had to be activated via EMail.Now I have changed my PC and wanted to activate them again. The answer I received from eflightmanuals was : "Sorry, we don't support our former activation system anymore, your CDs can't be activated again. You need to buy them again"And when complaining about it, they told me, it is normal, software has a limited lifetime.I am puzzled to put it mildly. I buy a bunch of CDs and have to throw them in the garbage collector now.Is such a business practice normal in the US ? Is it true, when buying software from the US one is facing a limited lifetime ?Mike

[mgh 89]

I think you got what you paid for - a set of manuals on CD that you could, and did, activate. What made you think you were entitled to re-activate indefinitely.Although I'm not in the US, I see no need for your reference to US business practice. That company's behaviour isn't specific to the US - a company anywhere in the world could reasonably adopt that practice.

[Shaka 2]

>Is such a business practice normal in the US ? Is it true,>when buying software from the US one is facing a limited>lifetime ?No, this is not normal business practice. Although they aren't doing anything wrong, they certainly aren't building any goodwill with customers. Although this sort of behaviour is not unheard of, I certainly wouldn't call it normal. It is perfectly reasonable for you to ask to re-activate your software. You aren't the first person in the world to get a new computer. As for the "software has a limited lifetime" comment, I have to wonder if this means that the software "disables" itself after a certain period of time. When you bought the CDs, did they tell you that your licence would expire after a certain amount of time? I doubt it. - Martin