ARTICLE · 30 SEPTEMBER 2003

Finally—one for software licensors

Freehills

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AustraliaStrategy

Amalia Stone

There have been a number of recent cases¹ in which software licensors have been held liable for differences between customer expectations and delivered software. Armchair viewers might be forgiven for thinking that now is not a good time (legally speaking, leaving aside downturns in the IT sector) to be a software licensor. However, the tides do seem to be turning.

In MLW Technology v May & Ors² the licensee claimed that the licensor had repudiated the licence because:

not all source code for the software had been provided on the commencement date (although it was provided within a number of months)
the software would not operate with the compiler the licensee was using, and to purchase a copy of the compiler that the licensor used would have cost about $10,000. Instead, the licensee revised the software, so that it would work with a different compiler

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