On Tuesday 24 May 2006, an article was published in The
Age and in the Sydney Morning Herald that discussed recent changes to the
AutoCAD 2006 end user license agreement (EULA).
CADinfo.net sought more information from Autodesk and
below is the reply sent to us by Blackie McDonald, a Sydney public relations
firm.
Thursday 26 May 2005
Mr Nathan Cochrane
Editor ‘NEXT"
The Age
250 Spencer Street
Melbourne, Victoria
Dear Sir
Autodesk has 6 million users worldwide, and customer
satisfaction is a key imperative at Autodesk. We have built a reputation
for providing leading edge software solutions developed in conjunction
with our users’ requirements.
Our business process has as a cornerstone the
requirement to work closely with our users, listening to their comments
about what they need and then taking that information to our R&D
processes to build products that match those needs.
We spend many weeks and millions of dollars each year
communicating with our users through surveys, conferences, user groups,
direct mail campaigns etc.
Given our commitment to our customers’ satisfaction,
we are concerned that the comments raised by Mr. Waddington in his letter
which appeared on Page 6 of NEXT the IT section of The Age and Sydney
Morning Herald on Tuesday, May 24, 2005, which imply that Autodesk’s
standard licensing terms and conditions undermine our customers’ rights.
Such fears are, quite simply, unfounded. The isolated license terms he has
highlighted have been taken out of context and may give a misleading
impression.
On his complaint that there is a lack of transparency
in our licensing terms, Autodesk’s licensing policies are open and
readily available for viewing at www.autodesk.com.au/licensing.
Users of our software are advised to read the terms of the end-user
agreements accompanying the software. The preface to our standard Software
License is an explicit request to the customer to read the terms and
conditions carefully before agreeing to them; and provides further that if
the customer does not agree to the terms, the software may be returned
within 30 days for a full refund.
Any customer wishing to seek clarification of our terms
and conditions may of course also contact us directly. In this regard, we
have in fact previously replied directly to Mr. Waddington on the
allegations he raised in his letter.
We believe our terms and conditions reflect both
industry practice and a careful balance of the benefits and risks to all
parties inherent in transactions of this nature. Autodesk’s licenses are
priced on the basis that they are issued solely to the license holder for
use in a particular territory. Our licensing policy recognises exceptional
situations that arise, however, and provide mechanisms for customers’
requests in legitimate cases for transfer of licenses for use in another
territory.
Autodesk has to date not conducted an audit pursuant to
the audit clause raised by Mr. Waddington. Given piracy problems that
plague our industry, the right to conduct an audit is however a mechanism
used by many software companies to protect the intellectual property
rights in their software. The contractual right to conduct an audit cannot
subvert any rights or protections a customer may have under the law.
The suggestion that Autodesk may exercise this right in
an invasive manner on legitimate users that may compromise the security of
their work created by using our software is unjustified. It is clearly not
in Autodesk’s interests to do so. What had been overlooked in Mr
Waddington’s letter is the fact that Autodesk’s terms expressly
provide that an audit can only be conducted after reasonable notice
to the customer is given. The costs arising from such an audit would only
be claimed if the audit reveals infringement has been committed.
As a reputable software company Autodesk relies on its
license terms and conditions with the aim of protecting its intellectual
property rights; not to compromise the interests or rights of its
customers upon whom the success of the company rests. The good faith of a
contracting party may be evidenced in the manner it has exercised its
rights. In this regard we do not believe that Autodesk has ever
unreasonably resorted to its contractual rights against a customer to
warrant an imputation of such lack of good faith.
Autodesk
