It doesn’t matter whether you a consumer buying for personal use or a business buying for commercial use, public policy set by the law of the land and precedents set by its courts is enjoyed by all unless designated otherwise.
If you wish to be treated as a consumer in the eyes of consumer protection law, it means not using something in a professional or profit-making enterprise. Once you make something your business, the law tends to expect that you know your business.
You or a company agreeing to a EULA or TOS doesn’t allow a licensor to skirt public policy.
Which policy? What happens if an office building buys a home edition of a word processor and uses it for its technical writing division?
Are you saying businesses haven't been nailed for doing that, and that the courts didn't enforce penalties on those businesses?
Boilerplate OEM and OS licensing being violated by businesses has led to significant sanctions.
Copyright laws are designed to protect the code in question.
Copyright laws grant a creator with a legal monopoly over the distribution of their work. This grants wide-ranging ability to define the terms of the conditions needed for them to grant permission for a copy to be made, with a limited set of carve-outs.
They are not designed to protect hardware or software that fall outside the scope of the copyright itself.
Hardware can be covered by other things like patents, however, I do not get the "software" portion you added there. How does software, which is code, fall outside the scope of the copyright of itself?
In the US, defendants have often used a misuse defense to override such actions because the courts have set precedents that those actions don’t align with public policy especially in the cases of monopolization attempts.
You mean plaintiffs? It's generally not a crime to exercise one's rights to their state-granted monopoly.
Here Nvidia through CUDA and it’s Titan’s EULA or TOS are basically trying to limit a certain segment of datacenter users to strictly Tesla based gpus.
Yes, this is the apparent goal. Copyright law is not structured to prevent this, and as a mechanism for granting a monopoly tends to concentrate this kind of power.
Nvidia is using EULAs and copyright protection of Titans and it’s drivers not to protect the Titan product itself but rather it’s Tesla products. Nvidia is basically trying to extend it Titan copyrights onto Tesla products.
Nvidia is declining to grant data centers permission to copy their Titan drivers for use in their services. For now at least, there is still the option that a data center roll their own software stack at their own expense, or purchase the SKU and copyrighted software with the applicable permissions.
It’s an anticompetitive practice even though both are products of the same company. Notice how Nvidia exempts block chain processing.
This is inherent to copyright, as it forbids others from copying someone else's work and gives the producer a large amount of arbitrary power over the disposition of their work. There are other scenarios from books, music, and various forms of open-source licensing where a copyright owner adds stipulations or can even arrange means to revoke permission after the fact. They can, except in certain situations, even arbitrarily allow one thing and not another.
In the US, it's one thing to argue that these powers are being leveraged in a manner counter to the original intent of the framers of the Constitution when they empowered the legislature to create this legal foundation, or that the laws do not make a distinction concerning a created work that in some fashion serves an integral or functional role in a system. That's an argument on what ought to be, rather than how the industry, laws, and courts have generally behaved.
Yes, the nature of shrink wrapped or click through EULAs may allow unsophisticated users to skirt perfectly legal stipulations but anyone is perfectly in their rights to ignore EULA and TOS stipulations with no legal weight.
This is begging the question by declaring a set of stipulations to have no legal weight, so they can be ignored. This has not been demonstrated, either by the behavior of Sakura Internet or the cases of other enterprise-level or professional software products.
The decision that something has no legal weight isn't made prior to a court's decision or legislation, and the equivalent boilerplate in other services or products has shown that the laws and precedent in the US are eroding even the protections around consumers.
While this is being challenged in spots, the legal system has in recent times opted to consider stipulations signing away the rights to filing lawsuits or joining in a class action sufficiently weighty for things ranging from credit cards to data plans.
Boilerplate contracts don’t have the same legal weight as mutually drafted contracts because courts have deemed that boilerplate contracts tend to be construed in favor the drafter. It’s one thing to have a mutually drafted contract with input from both parties that dictate exclusive use of a product.
This is shifting from "no weight" to it being not the same, which seems like a crucial difference. A non-zero weight can still be a different weight--as is something legally "heavier"-- which becomes more non-zero the further out of scope a defendant is from being a non-professional user.
There's always the option to not purchase something whose terms you find unfavorable, and there's limited policy compelling that a product that conforms to your specific budget-cutting needs be produced.
That language needs validation by the courts to allow a licensor to legally enforce such terms unless there exist a mutually drafted contract where both parties agree that the EULAs and TOSes involved will be followed.
If Sakura Internet wanted to roll the dice, they could have tried. It probably would have taken more than their data center group being unhappy that they couldn't get Tesla or Quadro features rolled into their offered services cheaper. While I wouldn't know about Japan's precedents, if this were a US case there would have been pushback on the court's compelling Nvidia to give their created work to Sakura Internet. There's other public policy that tends to be unfavorable in forcing speech, although there have been federal attempts to compel the delivery or creation of software for law enforcement.
There would need to be something more explicitly invoked, such as legislation or anti-trust being asserted by the government.
