Microsoft has now lost twice in a £270 million case brought by UK reseller ValueLicensing, and it is asking the Supreme Court for permission to try again. The Competition Appeal Tribunal ruled in 2025 that reselling and subdividing Microsoft's on-premise licences did not infringe its copyright. Microsoft appealed. On July 7, it lost that too. On July 21, the tribunal granted an extended stay while Microsoft prepares its Supreme Court application, but stopped short of freezing the case entirely.
How a case Oracle lost 14 years ago is troubling Microsoft, forcing it to seek a lifeline from UK's Supreme Court
In 2012, Oracle went to the European Court of Justice to stop people reselling its software licences second-hand. It lost. That judgment, known as UsedSoft, settled a simple idea: once you sell someone a perpetual software licence, you cannot control what they do with it afterwards. Fourteen years on, that ruling is proving to be Microsoft's biggest problem in a London courtroom. Read the article in full here.