>For Valve, it would only apply to tangible games, not to online licenses. According to the UFC, the initial purchaser must be able to resell these games second-hand, even those acquired on the platform.
Sounds like physical games that must be activated on Steam to be able to be played. Once you activate them you can't play on another account even if you have the DVD (but sometimes it's just a code in the case). That's an opposite of most physical console games that can be resold and played on other consoles, under other accounts.
For example I have The Evil Within phsyical collector's edition (awesome game btw) and it comes with a Steam code. I can't play the game under other Steam accounts. And the physical DVDs are worthless, I can't resold them. On the other hand if I would have bought the game on PS4 or XBox One I could just give the disks to someone else and they can play the game no problem.
Given that the EU court has confirmed it was legal to resale your own digital Oracle license AND Oracle had to allow the new buyer the same downloads/update/support as the original one (and given that it's Oracle), I'm not sure the ruling would be different with purely digital games.
About 7 years ago I had purchased an annual LinkedIn subscription. About a month into it I decided I didn't like running a recruiting business anymore. I was stuck with the subscription. I found someone who was willing to buy it off me for maybe 20% of what they would have paid. LinkedIn had zero interest in letting and/or helping me transfer to another person. What I ended up doing was adding the buyer to my company account, changing the company name (on LinkedIn), and then had them remove me. It worked great!
Even with console cartridges what you buy is not the hardware but a license to use a copyrighted material.
Copyright laws does not restrict the buyer from reselling, that's called "first sale doctrine" or "exhaustion of rights". You can resell books and movies, you should be able to resell game licenses.
>"what you buy is not the hardware but a license to use a copyrighted material" //
That depends, did the advertised product say "licence $game for £50" or did it say "buy"? If it said buy then I own the copy and can certainly resell it. If it said "license" or "buy a time-limited license" then as long as they made it clear "you can not pass this license to a third party" and required explicit consent to that, they're in the clear IMO.
Beyond that they're pulling a scam and those who hold ultimate responsibility for such scams should go to jail.
Copyright law doesn't exist in France so doesn't matter. France has droit d'auteur, that can be translated litteraly as author's rights. There are quite deep differences.
The concept of exhaustion of rights is probably ludicrous from a French perspective. The most common adjective used with the word rights in French must be "inaliénable", because most rights cannot expire nor be sold nor be taken away.
That's going to be a big culture shock for Valve. You'll forgive me for not going into more details but this would require a fairly long post to illustrate how different the law is.
France does have first sale exhaustion, Germany to for similar reasons; if you author a book and sell it, you cannot tell the buyer what they can and cannot do with that book. The buyer can use it as toilet paper if they want.
That's first sale doctrine, it doesn't touch your author's rights.
What about digital movies? Or eBooks? Can you resell those after you've watched them?
Not arguing for either side here, just saying digital goods can be a bit more complicated than you're making them out to be.
First sale doctrine made sense when part of the cost of an item was the physical product itself, but with digital products, there's a near-zero production/distribution cost, so you're really only paying for the right to consume the media (book, movie, game, music, etc)
So in that case, what exactly are you reselling at that point?
> So in that case, what exactly are you reselling at that point?
Yes. Reselling is actually equivalent to a refund from the authors' perspective. Problem is that people are too often reselling to buy their next thing rather than because they are dissatisfied with the product. On the other hand, refund policies based on arbitrary rules are not satisfying, too.
It may not seem like a problem for you, but every time you do that, someone else gets to consume the creator's work without the creator getting paid, which reduces the incentive to create.
In the long run, the problem may be less books to read because less people will write them.
It is of course possible to look at this only from one side, but that approach - from either side - is not sustainable.
But, again, this is how property has worked for a long time. (Since its invention?) It’s been sustainable for thousands of years. Why is it not sustainable now?
Interesting question. You actually can't resell digital movies in France because you can't buy a digital movie per se.
The common digital platforms operate on a 24h or 48h rental basis. You actually don't own the movie. You pay to view it once, you could view it multiple times within that timeframe, then it's gone.
> Even with console cartridges what you buy is not the hardware but a license to use a copyrighted material
And I'm pretty sure that's why copying your own games/movies was decided legal here (as long as you don't share them), because the publisher themselves made it so the physical media is not the product.
Sounds like physical games that must be activated on Steam to be able to be played. Once you activate them you can't play on another account even if you have the DVD (but sometimes it's just a code in the case). That's an opposite of most physical console games that can be resold and played on other consoles, under other accounts.
For example I have The Evil Within phsyical collector's edition (awesome game btw) and it comes with a Steam code. I can't play the game under other Steam accounts. And the physical DVDs are worthless, I can't resold them. On the other hand if I would have bought the game on PS4 or XBox One I could just give the disks to someone else and they can play the game no problem.