Sign of the times

While we were out running around last night, one of the stops we made was to browse around at Half-Price Books. (One of my favorite places!) As I was walking past the software section I noticed a little sign telling customers that they would be glad to buy and resell various games or children’s software but would not be doing transactions involving Operating Systems or Office/Productivity software any longer. The reason given for this is that they felt that with all the various Product Activation and one-time installation schemes being built-in to software there was no way to be sure that they were selling a satisfactory product that would work for the customer who purchased it.

I guess I can see why they would stop doing that. I certainly wouldn’t want to be charged with checking every copy of software that comes in to see whether it’s going to run for the next person who installs it, and I guess I could see the potential for people to install software, copy the installation cd and then sell the original while still using the actual software. I don’t know what the answer is there, but I thought it was interesting. 🙂

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