EU Court of Justice rules that you own and can resell digital downloads


Mr_Loon

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Wow this has certainly put the cat amongst the pigeons!


The gist of it is, that if you live in the EU and download a game on Steam, you own it and can therefore resell it, should you choose to do so.


Full article on RPS


EU Ruling PDF


Feels like a victory for the common man IMHO, it'll be really interesting to see how it plays out though.
 
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Interesting article alright.Some restrictions should be put on dlc and ingame exclusuves too as they really piss me off!
 
I'm not entirely certain I agree with this outcome. From a personal standpoint, I mean: legally, it makes sense.


When you buy second hand physical media, you are getting something that is necessarily inferior in some way to what the original owner had. Could be something superficial like "new game smell", or substantial like missing manual or scratches on the disk. In any event, the person who buys it first is absolutely getting something that the person it is resold to will not have. There's also a potential incentive to hold onto the original: box art, physical media, things like this might cause someone to value the product they're buying/selling for more than the software that it actually is.


What do you get when you buy a second hand digital download? Exactly the same thing as the person you're buying it from, just later. What is time worth to the average person? If you can wait a week and get the exact same thing for half price, will you? I know I will, but I routinely buy games months after they've come out. There just isn't the same incentive to buy an original from the manufacturer as there is with physical media. I foresee a strange future if Steam is forced to allow people to sell their digital games.
 
well yeah, steam will have more competition, of course itll struggle a bit more with this
 
does that mean we'll be able to unregister games from our steam acounts to resell them? whouhou, I'm rich!
 
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I think a lot of people will now spend more money on games, knowing this, and that they can [in time] sell them on.


Some people only purchased so many games on Tape/Cartridge/CD/DVD etc.. knowing that in a couple months, they would sell that and get a few quid back in their pocket to put towards the next new game out.


Without this option, I imagine some people would be less prone to spend so much and restrict their downloading, else it gets out of hand and you spend too much.
 
My gut feeling relating to this ruling is largely positive, as it appears to be an early attempt to give consumers genuine rights in a digital economy.


The mention of Steam in the original post was purely as an example, from my understanding this ruling could equally apply to digital downloads from Sony / Nintendo / Microsoft / Apple / Google etc. Whether the ruling applies to other digital products such as music or ebooks is of course open to debate.


What is unclear from the ruling is to what extent a supplier of digital goods has to facilitate their resale. Taking Steam as an example it is by no means clear that a resale mechanic would have to be included in the Steam client itself, just that a consumer would have the right to somehow allow a resale. Whether the person purchasing a 2nd hand game originally bought on Steam would also have the right to download / receive patches / updates for the game from Steam would also be open to debate.


Another interesting consideration is the right of the consumer to loan digital content to friends / family in the manner you would be able to do so with a physical book / game cartridge etc.
 
I was happy to heare about it too but I'm wondering if it means you can theoretically resell (for example) your amazon e-books but in reality there is no way to transfer it to another account. So they should actually have to implement this possibility. Do you think they will?
 
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