I am wondering if they cleared this with their lawyers? At a minimum it looks like a variant of a binding resale price, which is not legal in the EU. Yes, Dorico is selling their own product, but it is based on the ownership of of finale. On the other hand it seems pretty obvious that a lot of value is being created for the customers.
I am absolutely not saying that it is clear something is illegal here, but there kind of is a resale, the product being sold is an upgrade from finale to dorico, which can only be sold if finale confirms the existance of a finale license. And the parties have obviously agree what the price must be.
Only Steinberg/Dorico are making a sale, I don't see any reason to think Finale are forcing their hand on price.
More likely it's Finale says "offer a good price to our users, and in return we'll promote it to our user-base", and Steinberg decide what that price will be.
Confirmation that the license exists has to be handled a bit carefully for GDPR reasons, but that's not insurmountable. Competitor cross-grades are pretty common practice in those (fewer and fewer each year) sectors which still sell perpetual software licenses.
Well, finale is advertising the price as an offer to their customers, it is hard to see how they could do that without an agreement. How else could they make the offer? Price discussions between competitors is an absolute no-go under EU law.
What makes you think Steinberg didn’t dictate the price? How are they competitors when Finale is dead? You’re referring to price fixing laws between ongoing competition, which is illegal in this US too. This is not that by any stretch of the imagination.
There is an agreement that the price can be offered, that is plenty. As long as the product is in the market there is competition, even if it is not actively being sold, and nothing prevents the seller of finale from changing their mind, as an agreement with a competitior to stop selling their product would most definitely be illegal.
Okay, there might be antitrust issues to possibly consider. For one company pushing/selling/trasferring it’s customers to another company, I think in the US it mostly depends on whether the result could be some kind of monopoly, so an important question might be whether the number of Dorico users and Finale users combined dominate the market for score-writing software, and how big that market is. https://www.justice.gov/atr/antitrust-laws-and-you
As @Earw0rm mentioned, this isn’t a “resale” in the sense that that word is defined in the law. Buying Dorico at a discount is not a “resale” of Finale, regardless of the agreement; they’re different products sold by different companies. There is also no evidence, no reason to believe that Finale had any say in the sale price of Dorico. But, yes, the companies did agree to nudge customers from Finale towards Dorico.
The nudge is not mandatory, and the transition is opt-in and not automatic, so customers have the choice, and that lessens the probability that this crosses any laws. Dorico seems to have healthy competition from Sibelius, MuseScore and others, and the market has been called “saturated”, so no clear indication the result would be a monopoly. We also don’t know if Finale solicited agreements from other competitors who declined to participate, and if so that also reduces the possibility of this appearing shady in any way.
This kind of thing happens all the time when products and companies merge or die. It’s legal and acceptable for small companies to merge, and becomes illegal when merger gives the target company too much power, where ‘too much’ is determined by the court. In this case, since these are relatively niche (small) products, and it’s not a corporate merger but simply a targeted advertising & discount sale to a captive audience, and since the result probably isn’t a monopoly for Steinberg, it’s unlikely that any court would care about this agreement. Small companies are allowed to make agreements and do all kinds of things that large companies might get in trouble for.
