What Will Happen to Rented Software When Its Publisher Sinks?

MightyE asks: "With the advent of subscription software with renew-required keys, I have a question. What happens when a software company from which you lease goes under? Who will provide you your software keys in the future? Should a law be required that if such a company goes under, they must either sell the rights to rent keys to another company, or provide non-terminating keys to the current subscribers?" With many large software corporations looking to put these systems into effect, I think it's better to discuss this question now, rather than later.

"Currently if you purchase software, and the software company goes under, all you lose is support, you still have a working product. Consider a large corporation making a major rollout of "rented" (rented meaning any software with a time-limited key) software. If the software company closes its doors, the corporation has now invested thousands, hundreds of thousands, or even millions of dollars into rolling something out that may only work for the rest of the quarter.

On the other hand, consider that you are a company that rents software. If you are required to enable non-terminating keys for the event of corporate liquidation, this would only have to be broken once and one single non-terminating key could get out on the net, thus defeating one of the largest concepts behind "rented" software, anti-piracy (not that I don't whole-heartedly believe that any good software with a rented key won't be cracked with a key patch or something).

Certainly it seems a viable solution to require such companies to give or sell their key distribution duties to another company."