Do your software licenses make you a vendor-slave?

Techdirt has an interesting post tying together two separate stories that point out some of the more critical gotchas in software licensing.

“In both cases, the companies providing the licenses recognized (correctly) that this allowed them a tremendous amount of leverage in any future contract negotiation, since they could (literally, in some cases) lock up their customers' most important assets. For companies buying technology products who think things like the details of intellectual property law and licenses don't matter, perhaps these stories will make them a little more aware of a few of the reasons why it's important to understand what you license and what you own -- and recognizing that you never want to trust your most important assets to an outside vendor.”

In one story an automated parking station lost the ability to move customers' cars around, and in the other a health service provider lost access to patient data.

On a sidenote, does your BCP take account of the potential effect of your software vendors not being available to renew/replace your software license keys should a disaster cause you to move to a new location?