Microsoft turns to the UK Supreme Court after losing twice over second-hand software licenses, and billions could ride on the outcome
Microsoft is seeking permission to appeal to the UK Supreme Court after losing at both the Competition Appeal Tribunal and the Court of Appeal over the resale of its perpetual software licenses. The company’s argument that Office’s icons and clip art fall outside exhaustion rules was rejected, raising concerns about the resale of downloaded software. The outcome could affect a £270 million claim and a potential £3.5 billion class action affecting up to 2.7 million customers.
- ▪Microsoft lost at the Competition Appeal Tribunal and the Court of Appeal regarding the applicability of software exhaustion to its Office suite.
- ▪The company argued that icons, clip art, and other UI elements should be exempt from exhaustion, a claim the courts dismissed as producing odd results.
- ▪The dispute stems from a £270 million lawsuit by reseller ValueLicensing, which could expand into a £3.5 billion class action if the Supreme Court does not intervene.
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| Original publisher | TechRadar |
| Canonical URL | https://www.techradar.com/pro/microsoft-turns-to-the-uk-supreme-court-after-losing-twice-over-second-hand-software-licenses-and-billions-could-ride-on-the-outcome |
| Publication time | Fri, 31 Jul 2026 07:00:00 +0000 |
| Retrieval time | 2026-07-31T07:02:54.137Z |
| Last seen | 2026-07-31T07:02:54.137Z |
| Headline source | Publisher (no WeSearch rewrite) |
| Excerpt source | publisher body |
| Excerpt method | First ~120 words (~800 chars) of extracted publisher body, fair-use limited. |
| Summary | WeSearch · cerebras-chat (WeSearch summarizer) |
| Summary source text | contentText |
| Citation coverage | Summary is a WeSearch-generated derivative; primary citation is the original publisher URL. |
| Cluster | 6inFmz1RhtiE · 1 stories |
| Cluster logic | Grouped by semantic title/content similarity across sources within a rolling window. Same-publisher template collisions are excluded from coverage comparison. |
| Ranking reason | Story pages are not engagement-ranked. Hub feeds use recency, with optional source-diversified chronological ordering (cap consecutive stories per source). No personalized ranking. |
| Publisher visit | Yes — open original |
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| AI summary | May WeSearch generate its own short summary of the article? | Limited |
| Retrieval / RAG | May the content be exposed for third-party retrieval-augmented generation? | Not asserted |
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| Commercial reuse | May the content be reused commercially? | Not permitted |
Basis: Derived from the published RSS/Atom feed. Contact: [email protected]. Reviewed: 2026-07-24.
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Pro Microsoft turns to the UK Supreme Court after losing twice over second-hand software licenses, and billions could ride on the outcome News By Rahim Amir Published 31 July 2026 A costly legal situation in the making? When you purchase through links on our site, we may earn an affiliate commission. Here’s how it works. (Image credit: gguy / Shutterstock) Copy link Facebook X Whatsapp Reddit Pinterest Flipboard Threads Email Share this article 0 Join the conversation Follow us Add us as a preferred source on Google Newsletter Subscribe to our newsletter Microsoft has won an extended stay at the Competition Appeal Tribunal while it seeks permission to appeal to the UK Supreme Court, having lost at both the Tribunal and the Court of AppealIts argument that Office's icons and clip art…
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