Spectrasonics license transfer fee - unkindness behavior?

[cleverr1]

One aspect of this that I find interesting is that without any knowledge of how Spectrasonics will choose to distinguish between an upgrader of a "New" and a "Used" licencee it is difficult to place a value on a secondhand licence. All we have is Eric's perception that the first buyers payed "much more" and so it's right to give them better upgrade pricing.

I just don't get it. One unit leaves the distributor, gets resold and buyer/seller/licensor accept the $50 admin fee to cover the transfer. At this point the admin fee is taken care of, there is still the one unit in circulation so we should have parity. However, the licensor then reserves the right to be able to take another fee from the second buyer (or gift recipient) to be claimed as the difference between the costs of first and second time user upgrades (which we have not yet seen). Yet there is still parity in a licencee/licensor context, and the administration cost of the transfer has already been paid.

I really feel like Tom Hanks in that film "Big" - I don't get it.

Indeed, we do agree to differ here.

[z15]

2nd hand sales and license transfers are not something we want to encourage. We do them to solve problems and because its a kind of necessity in our business. But even with the transfer fee, it's a huge drain on our time and an overall loss for us.

Okay, fair enough.

I understand, but that's intentional. We do want people to know that there's a difference between a new sale and a used sale. Encouraging used sales would not be a good thing for our company or our dealers...so there has to be a difference (even though it is a minor difference). Otherwise, we really couldn't do license transfers at all.

Yeah, that's understandable considering the previous point and I still have no problem with that as long as I (now) know what the situation is before buying one of your products.

I guess some are going to get annoyed if they don't read EULA / FAQ carefully before registering or buying second hand, but I have a feeling that's the general problem with software licenses and not specifically your policy at all. With a piece of hardware, a music album, etc. it's easy to understand for people that you buy it, it's yours, you sell it and don't have to pay anyone anything extra, and it's someone else's. With software licenses you'd have to check out carefully if you can sell the product at all, if there's a transfer fee, if the transfer requires special permission... And most people still aren't probably realizing that these things vary wildly from piece of software / sample library to another which leads to frustration and angry rants at worst, and confusion at best. The concept of buying something vs buying the right to use something...

... it could be like "second hand copy owners pay 100 bucks for this free update and furthermore miss the great 50% off introductory offer of our new product" or like "well, we might have some cool little crossgrade deals coming on in a few years, maybe, and we'll probably just give the option to original owners, sorry".

I don't have anything to complain myself, but somehow I have a feeling this is the point some of you might want to get across. Might be wrong, too, wouldn't be the first time.

Conjecture and speculation.
All I ask is this: Judge us by what we have done, not by what you think we might do.

We've been in business for 14 years now, so we've got a long track record to be judged on and lots of customers to ask if they've been treated fairly by our practices. I think you'll find that we've been extremely generous with our users.

Like I think and hope I wrote pretty clearly, I have no problems with your business whatsoever (don't own your products but seriously thinking of buying at least one of them and this isn't affecting my decision negatively), and I was trying to give those pieces of fictional speculation as an example what SOME might think considering that wording, nothing else. They are not my personal opinions.

The point I was simply trying to get across is that every single customer of yours might not know your reputation and things you've done. Someone who sells / buys used a Spectrasonics product doesn't neccessarily know what kinds of upgrades and deals you've done in the past that the clause refers to, or might not even know what your background in the business is at all. Potential customers who don't know your practices as well as I (and some others in this thread) do might start wondering something along what I said. Or maybe not, who knows.