Originally posted by frantaylor
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My meaning was in relation to your own property. Once you have purchased an item it becomes your property, and you can do with it what you want in the context of it being your property. You have an implied license to use the item, for your personal use, in the context of it being your property, however you want. This does not necessarily extend to re-sale of the item because it would no longer be your property after the resale. You should not be able to enjoy profit from a re-sale derived from the advertising expenditures of the original manufacturer, for example. Even there there is the concept of "first sale" where a lot of the IP rights of the original maker of an item expire after the first sale of that item.
As far as an end user of a graphics card using IP embedded in that card, none of this discussion applies. The end user clearly has an implied license to whatever IP is embedded in the card, and any original patent holders have absolutely no right to try to restrict what software an end user runs to use that card, which is now the end user's legal property.
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