Martyna Polak
Martyna is a Solicitor in the Commercial, IP and Technology team at Memery Crystal LLP. She advises on a variety of contentious and commercial intellectual property matters, particularly in the field of trade marks and copyright.
Practice Area
Panel
- Contributing Author
Qualified Year
- 2018
Education
- Warsaw School of Economics
- King's College London
- BPP Law School
1 Contributions by Martyna Polak
PRACTICE NOTES
Disabling devices in on‑premise B2B software: UK legal, contractual and regulatory risks, and drafting and practical guidance
This Practice Note
This Practice Note explores the use of non-contractual mechanisms by software suppliers to halt or restrict the operation of on-premise software in business-to-business licences, the resulting legal considerations, and the real-world impact on drafting relevant software licences. It introduces a range of disabling tools:
Time bombs
Logic bombs
Back door/trap door
Fork locks
Remote control and switching off, or ‘deprovisioning’
Where a customer breaches licence terms, or fails to pay licence or support charges, the supplier can pursue legal action. Yet litigation brings expense and uncertainty, and may strain the customer–supplier relationship. As a result, a supplier may favour a more immediate, practical approach: deploying disabling devices to stop the software from running, triggered remotely or automatically by the supplier. For most developers, such features are straightforward to create and embed. Activating (or threatening to activate) these tools can give the supplier significant leverage over customers, especially where the software is critical to the business. That said, use of these devices has fallen markedly in recent years, in part due to a shift in the way software is licensed. First, there was a move towards...
TMT
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