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EU Rules in favour of reselling digital downloads.

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fenrif:
So RPS has this article about the EU court of justice ruling that digital sellers can't prohibit you from reselling things. Which means that if you live in the EU and you buy games online (say from steam, origin, xbox live?) you are perfectly within your rights to sell that game on once you're done with it. I can only assume this also further strengthens consumer rights regarding reselling used physical copies of games, something the industry is generally trying to discourage or outlaw as best they can.

It also seems to say that schemes like the EA online pass, which requires pre-owned buyers to pay more money to EA to access the full game are illegal.

Publishers and developers have been steadily trying to erode their customers rights for years now, and it's honestly surprising to see someone pushing back for us.

freeformschooler:
By "can't prohibit", does this mean if a service doesn't have functionality in place for reselling digital downloads (like Steam) then they have to implement it in the EU? If not then I don't see much changing.

But otherwise this is awesome. It's an irksome part of digital downloads that I was pretty much ready to live with.

fenrif:
I don't actually know. I'd assume that at the very least steam would have to start letting you resell games you allready own if you buy a bundle?

They may not have to impliment a whole new peer to peer selling interface and infrastructure, but I imagine they'd have to do something like let you de-associate a CD key with your account and then let someone else use it? I guess a lot of it depends on how it's enforced, and I'm sure the games industry will try and appeal it or whatever the process is in this situation. But it's a definate step in the right direction at least.

Dariush:
1) Start a company that buys used games for 50% of their cost and sells at 80%;
2) Profit.

10ebbor10:
I fear this might result in more problems. Producers changing their EULA's to a subscription system for one, and such.

As it seems to me, it states nowhere that they should implement systems for resale, just that they can't prevent it.

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