No, Protel does not forbid license transfers. They ask that you contact them with the license number before you complete a transaction so they can verify that it is a valid license. After that, you are free to buy the license and upgrade if appropriate.
Any buyer of a license other than from Protel should be cautious about this. Protel (Altium) will confirm the transferability by the seller of the license.
There are two kinds of hazards in license transfers. Neither of them is terribly common. The first is that the license is not really transferable, as Mr. Selfridge notes below, or, worse, that the seller doesn't have a license at all, is just looking for a fast buck. By checking with Protel about the identity of the license holder, this possibility can be made very unlikely. Essentially, if the buyer promised to pay the seller the agreed price, the seller transfered the license to the buyer by so informing Protel (Protel will contact the seller before finalizing a transfer to make sure that the seller really wants to do it), Protel confirmed the transfer, the only hazard remaining is the second, that the buyer does not pay.
If the buyer is cautious and confirms the identity of the license holder, and does not pay anything at all before legitimacy is confirmed, there is no substantial hazard to the buyer. (I've had buyers post a small deposit before initiating the transfer process; a seller could theoretically pocket the deposit and run. A lot of legal hazard for a small return. Not very likely to happen with a legit owner of a license.)
So the risk is entirely the sellers' (if payment is made only after transfer). The risk is that the seller will transfer the license to the buyer and then the buyer will not pay. However, if the contract provides that the license reverts to the seller if the buyer does not pay within a certain period, as evidenced by the claim of the seller and failure of the buyer upon demand to produce evidence of payment, it is highly likely that Protel would honor the reversal of the transfer; this scenario is not known to me to have happened. But Protel did honor a transfer in a case where the new licensee received a license as partial satisfaction of a debt, by court order (so the seller did not consent).
Protel does not charge for license transfers, and I don't think they want to get into a situation where they'd have to consult a lawyer to figure out what to do. It should be simple and clear.
The *simplest* way to transfer a license, beyond face-to-face, exchange of signed transfer with a witness, in consideration of payment acknowledged in the transfer document, is to use a trusted broker. That's the service I provided. I'll still do it if anyone asks, for a fee. But you can do it directly if the proper precautions are taken.
There is a mailing list for license resales, [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Right now there is a DXP license for sale, seller is asking 80% of the current full price, which is in the U.S., $9995. 75% has been more common. Occasionally buyers have gotten lucky, I think one Protel 99SE license sold on eBay for $1000. The buyer, at that time, could have turned around and sold it for three times that much. Maybe more. In fact, the insanity of this is one reason I started brokering license sales.
(My last sale of a 99SE license, about a year ago, was at $3500. I think an SE license is still worth that much.)
To my knowledge, Protel is the only CAD software that maintains such high resale prices. They don't publicize it, but one is taking much less risk buying a Protel license than one of the other major CAD systems, which generally have licenses which are not transferable unless the underlying business is sold. If then.
In fact, if one buys a "used" license, with the proper precautions, there is very little risk, for in the short-term the resale value is likely to be close to the purchase cost.
Historically, there have been moments where a Protel license was worth more, in the resale market, than what it originally cost (because of upgrade discounts being offered).
You cannot transfer a license for an older version if you used that license to upgrade. In other words, you can't sell your 99SE license if you used it to upgrade to DXP.
Altium's position is that the older license is subsumed into the upgrade license, and if either license is sold, the other is sold with it. And that is how they will maintain the registration.
Now, if you sold a DXP license to someone, and kept your Protel 98 or 99SE CD and manual, and continued to use it, would you be in copyright violation? I would not want to place a bet on the outcome of this.... I think that with the Protel 98 license, you might be legally safe, because the license agreement specifically allowed transfer and did not require approval of the transaction. But Protel wised up and the newer agreements were more restrictive. Some people were worried that Protel might be phasing out transferability, but Protel assured us that there was no intention to prevent legitimate sales, just to prevent fraud and, perhaps, this matter of the subsumed licenses.
Even with Protel 98 or an earlier upgrade base license, Protel could bollix the plan to retain the older license by refusing to authorize the transfer unless the seller agreed not to keep any CDs, manuals, or installations of older licenses used for upgrade when transfering a newer license. I don't recall them asking for this promise. But they might start at any time....
Again, I don't think Protel could prevent the sale of a Protel 98 license independently by someone who bought, say, DXP as an upgrade. But Protel *could* then refuse to honor the DXP license for upgrade discounts. Upgrade pricing is voluntary, Protel is not obligated to provide the discounts.
Abd ul-Rahman Lomax LOMAX DESIGN ASSOCIATES PCB design, consulting, and training Protel EDA license resales Easthampton, Massachusetts, USA (413) 527-3881, efax (419) 730-4777 [EMAIL PROTECTED]
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