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[fenrif]

It "punishes" game developers by requiring them to abide by the same consumer protection/rights laws as every other industry that wants to sell things.

Publishers worry about anything and everything, the decision to sell things cheap (I assume you mean stuff like indie bundles and steam 75% off sales?) is still entirely upto them. Plenty of other non-video game things are sold in sales and still manage to make a profit.

This is considerably different with goods that aren't entirely digital. Even goods that are theoretically just data, like movies or regular games, still experience some manner of loss or decay. A digital product has zero disadvantages in getting it from some shady guy on a street corner versus the people who made it in the first place.

I don't get what that last sentance means, "streamline people being able to rent it in a roundabout way?" Are you objecting to the idea of being able to rent video games?

I was referring to customers who resell the game when they're done with it- they're more or less just renting the game in a roundabout fashion.

I don't see why you're determined to pain people who sell their games on as some shady guys on street corners, instead of like, anyone who owns something they no longer use? Digital goods depreciate in value just as much as physical goods. Check the steam sales and see how heavily discounted various games are. Do you think Call of Duty 1 is as valuable today as it was on release? Games depreciate over time because as more people play them, and more sequels are released, and graphics move forward, the games become less worth the original sale price. That game publishers try to pretend this isn't true is just an example of them refusing to deal fairly with their customers. Any EA game with a mutiplayer component for example will get the servers shut down (sometimes within a year or two of release) which severely devalues the game. And when the majority of big budget games are coasting on graphical fidelity alone, then a years worth of graphical improvements in the industry means that the main selling point of the game is devalued.

And no, buying something and selling it when you're done is not a form of rental. Renting something is when you pay a hugely reduced fee and borrow it for a short amount of time, returning it to the same person who loaned you it when you're done. Buying and reselling is renting in a roundabout fashion in the same way an apple is an orange in a roundabout fashion.

[Goron]

An apple can rot. An orange can rot. A wooden chair can scratch and break. A frisbee can bend.
Those decrease their value.
A digital download can do none of those things. It's intrinsic value never decays. Ever.
That is not to say the amount people are willing to pay remains the same. A pair of pants can go out of style and down in price, but the value of the materials and work behind making the pants is still there; but the pants CAN also deteriorate or get eaten by moths and actually lose value; a digital game cannot. Period.
My copy of kings quest from the 90s is EXACTLY the same now as it was then, no matter how hard you try to argue that it is not.

[Lord Snow]

regarding selling the parts of a bundle you already own, the document specifically says that if you get a bunch of licenses in a bundle, you can only sell the whole bundle, not individual licenses.

So?
Sell the parts you already own. Not the parts from the bundle, the parts you had before.

[Flare]

It punishes game developers in favor of resellers. One obvious issue that's already been raised is that now it's impossible to sell something for cheap without having to worry about being undercut with it later, but it also applies much more generally than that as well. Shunting some of the rewards for making a game from the people who made it to people who facilitate reselling it in order to streamline people being able to rent it in a roundabout way has some obvious, unpleasant connotations.

For certain methods of reselling I can see this not being as big of a problem. For example, for certain digital distributors like Steam, gamersgate, or g2g they can allow reselling of titles but with certain rules applying. For example, the distributor provides you a service for reselling games while collecting a bit of commission from themselves and the game developers.

Most such methods might end being classified as illegal if mandatory, as it might be counted as a barrier to resale. Besides, unless they charge absurd amounts for that service, they don't get even close to the amount of money from an actual sale.

Yes, there are some cases like coercive tied selling like banks only offering certain services only if the client transfers all their saving accounts to their group being illegal, the closed singular nature of systems like steam however doesn't seem to be analogous to coercive practices (if the practices that steam already has in place is to be accepted as non-coercive). The transfer of games from one user to another within systems like steam is like moving money inside of a bank of the same branch to a different account. Since you're relying on the infrastructure of the bank or system itself, there's going to be an argument that the thing providing the services for this sort of transaction should be reward monetarily for providing such a service.

Though of course, if you're selling steam games to people who don't have steam, this is a very big problem as the games are tied to the accounts themselves. This could however, as the article states, open a whole new can of worms.

[Shadowlord]

If the company that sold you the game can't stop you from reselling it to someone else, then they likely can't legally force you to give them a cut of your profit from reselling it either.

I'd wonder about Steam, though, because when you buy a game on Steam you're not just buying the game, but paying for the ability to redownload the game as many times as you want in perpetuity, get free updates, possibly have cloud saves if the game supports that, have both windows and mac versions of the game if the game supports that, have your settings and saves synced between computers if the game supports that, etc. You're paying for more than just the game itself.

[Flare]

If the company that sold you the game can't stop you from reselling it to someone else, then they likely can't legally force you to give them a cut of your profit from reselling it either.

Of course they can, there are instances of this happening already. Putting things for sale at an auction requires a fee, using certain internet sites requires the seller to pay the site commission. The problem with steam is their client you're forced to download and run every time you play the game. It is the necessity of their framework that the owner is allowed to play the games that makes them the market in which the people who own it must use or  you sell your whole account. Unless of course, Steam ditches the idea of a mandatory client running in the background, though I don't think they'd be doing that any time soon. However you sell the accessibility to the game or the game's ownership, Steam will ultimately be the ones that will have to do something in their infrastructure to enable the buyer to access their game.

[Meta]

An apple can rot. An orange can rot. A wooden chair can scratch and break. A frisbee can bend.
Those decrease their value.
A digital download can do none of those things. It's intrinsic value never decays. Ever.
That is not to say the amount people are willing to pay remains the same. A pair of pants can go out of style and down in price, but the value of the materials and work behind making the pants is still there; but the pants CAN also deteriorate or get eaten by moths and actually lose value; a digital game cannot. Period.
My copy of kings quest from the 90s is EXACTLY the same now as it was then, no matter how hard you try to argue that it is not.

Actually, no, it isn't. Digital data tend to accumulate errors over time, when they are copied over and over, or just even stored on CD or DVD.

[Shadowlord]

You can directly sell (or give) something to someone else without an intermediary. If the company you bought it from refuses to allow you to do that, would they not be in violation of this ruling?

[fenrif]

An apple can rot. An orange can rot. A wooden chair can scratch and break. A frisbee can bend.
Those decrease their value.
A digital download can do none of those things. It's intrinsic value never decays. Ever.
That is not to say the amount people are willing to pay remains the same. A pair of pants can go out of style and down in price, but the value of the materials and work behind making the pants is still there; but the pants CAN also deteriorate or get eaten by moths and actually lose value; a digital game cannot. Period.
My copy of kings quest from the 90s is EXACTLY the same now as it was then, no matter how hard you try to argue that it is not.

Oh yeah, I'll just fire up my copy of (insert any EA game for whom the servers have been shut down here) because they're exactly the same as when they were released!

And value is subjective. You're talking about things like durability and usefullness. What is the intrinsic value of a 2meg audio file? A 4 gb game installer? A car? Intrinsic value is a meaningless term because it assumes that anything ever has a set value and that the price of something isn't determined by a huge range of factors.

What did you pay for that copy of Kings Quest in the 90's? Would you pay the same now, for the same game, on the same floppy discs? If so you should probobly inform Gog.com that they're severely undercutting their own buisness becuase the intrinsic value of all those games is orders of magnitude more than they're selling them for! People are buying games from them for 3.99, when the intrinsic value of those games is easily 40.00, and thats with DRM and on floppies or CDs!

Also: what Meta said.

[ductape]

They could introduce a form a demurrage, in other words you would have to pay for the storage space of your digital media. This could be a fee per game or a membership fee in general. Therefore if you retain the right to trade your digital data, then you are also going to pay a parking fee while it is in their garage.

[palsch]

I'd wonder about Steam, though, because when you buy a game on Steam you're not just buying the game, but paying for the ability to redownload the game as many times as you want in perpetuity, get free updates, possibly have cloud saves if the game supports that, have both windows and mac versions of the game if the game supports that, have your settings and saves synced between computers if the game supports that, etc. You're paying for more than just the game itself.

The judgement is conflicted on this I believe. Specifically;

66      It must be observed that the exhaustion of the right of distribution of a copy of a computer program under Article 4(2) of Directive 2009/24 only concerns copies which have been the subject of a first sale in the European Union by the copyright holder or with his consent. It does not relate to contracts for services, such as maintenance agreements, which are separable from such a sale and were concluded, possibly for an unlimited period, on the occasion of the sale.

67      None the less, the conclusion of a maintenance agreement, such as those at issue in the main proceedings, on the occasion of the sale of an intangible copy of a computer program has the effect that the copy originally purchased is patched and updated. Even if the maintenance agreement is for a limited period, the functionalities corrected, altered or added on the basis of such an agreement form an integral part of the copy originally downloaded and can be used by the acquirer of the copy for an unlimited period, even in the event that the acquirer subsequently decides not to renew the maintenance agreement.

68      In such circumstances, the exhaustion of the distribution right under Article 4(2) of Directive 2009/24 extends to the copy of the computer program sold as corrected and updated by the copyright holder.

So it would seem that a sold piece of software would not have to include any additional services that were licensed alongside the software itself, but any modifications to the software through such a service prior to the date of sale would be included.

So if I bought a game that came with a six month customer service agreement and sold it after a month the customer service might not be passed across.

The issue is largely the separation of services and goods. Goods are here covered by the first sale doctrine. Services aren't. Oracle's main argument was that their software was a licensed service, not a good. This was rejected for software that is licensed in ways that effective give all other rights of ownership, but obviously actual services aren't covered.

On the other hand, certain service-like provisions were held to be part of the original good. Notably;

85      As may be seen from paragraph 81 above, it follows that a new acquirer of the user licence, such as a customer of UsedSoft, will be able, as a ‘lawful acquirer’ within the meaning of Article 5(1) of Directive 2009/24 of the corrected and updated copy of the computer program concerned, to download that copy from the copyright holder’s website, with that downloading constituting a reproduction of a computer program that is necessary to enable the new acquirer to use the program in accordance with its intended purpose.

Oracle had offered license holders (those who they sold the licenses too) to download the software from their site at any time. This ruling extended that particular right to any future holder of the license.

The question of patches and updates is grossly unclear here. I'm not sure if "corrected and updated" here refers to the updated software at the time of sale (as mentioned above), or if it suggests the new user is entitled to all future patches and updates, which may well be considered part of any maintenance agreement (a service explicitly excluded above). I don't think this is especially clear in the text. All I can tell is that any patches or updates that were already distributed (or, at the time of sale, available to) the original owner must be made avaliable to the new owner. Beyond that, search me.


I'm almost certain that a second ruling will be required to set the boundaries of how services like Steam need to come into line with these rules.

At a naive level it would appear that Steam must recognise account-to-account transfers of games purchased using the Steam service*. At the very least they would have to enable the new license holder to download the game, although there is the complicating factor that they are a distribution service as opposed to the copyright holder (as in the Oracle case). It may be that their services can be taken as separate to the purchase license. But given that would almost entirely torpedo the idea of digital reselling, effectively restricting peoples rights in a manner out of line with this ruling, I'd bet that a certain level of accommodation would be required by court.


* Games activated via CD key are a complicating case.

[fenrif]

In related news:

ACTA voted down in the EU. The secret copyright enforcement treatey, which was drafted and discussed entirely behind closed doors was actully voted down. "478 against and 39 in favour, with 165 abstentions." I dunno what's got into those guys at the EU, but I like it. I like it a lot.

Choice quotes:

"I am very pleased that the parliament has followed my recommendation and rejected Acta. The treaty is too vague and is open to misinterpretation. I will always support civil liberties over intellectual property rights protection in the EU."

"But now it is time to look forward and tell the commission that we are willing to work hand in hand on fighting counterfeiting and protecting copyright with full respect to fundamental freedoms. This time we will do it in the light of public opinion and involve a wide range of citizens and stakeholders from the start."

[alexandertnt]

An apple can rot. An orange can rot. A wooden chair can scratch and break. A frisbee can bend.
Those decrease their value.
A digital download can do none of those things. It's intrinsic value never decays. Ever.
That is not to say the amount people are willing to pay remains the same. A pair of pants can go out of style and down in price, but the value of the materials and work behind making the pants is still there; but the pants CAN also deteriorate or get eaten by moths and actually lose value; a digital game cannot. Period.
My copy of kings quest from the 90s is EXACTLY the same now as it was then, no matter how hard you try to argue that it is not.

Oh yeah, I'll just fire up my copy of (insert any EA game for whom the servers have been shut down here) because they're exactly the same as when they were released!

And value is subjective. You're talking about things like durability and usefullness. What is the intrinsic value of a 2meg audio file? A 4 gb game installer? A car? Intrinsic value is a meaningless term because it assumes that anything ever has a set value and that the price of something isn't determined by a huge range of factors.

What did you pay for that copy of Kings Quest in the 90's? Would you pay the same now, for the same game, on the same floppy discs? If so you should probobly inform Gog.com that they're severely undercutting their own buisness becuase the intrinsic value of all those games is orders of magnitude more than they're selling them for! People are buying games from them for 3.99, when the intrinsic value of those games is easily 40.00, and thats with DRM and on floppies or CDs!

Also: what Meta said.

This is actually a very good point.

When pants deteriorate, they lose value because no one else wants to pay as much for deteriorated pants. We look at them and go "hmmm, they look like crap, I do not want to purchase them" and thus our preception of their value goes down.

When a game becomes old, it too deteriorates. We look at them and go "hmmm, they look like crap, I do not want to purchase them" and thus our preception of their value goes down.

The same mechanic is at work here, make sure not to confuse physical condition directly with monetery value.

In related news:

ACTA voted down in the EU. The secret copyright enforcement treatey, which was drafted and discussed entirely behind closed doors was actully voted down. "478 against and 39 in favour, with 165 abstentions." I dunno what's got into those guys at the EU, but I like it. I like it a lot.

Damn, the EU is on a roll!

[Felius]

This is actually a very good point.

When pants deteriorate, they lose value because no one else wants to pay as much for deteriorated pants. We look at them and go "hmmm, they look like crap, I do not want to purchase them" and thus our preception of their value goes down.

When a game becomes old, it too deteriorates. We look at them and go "hmmm, they look like crap, I do not want to purchase them" and thus our preception of their value goes down.

The same mechanic is at work here, make sure not to confuse physical condition directly with monetery value.

To be more precise, the issue is the lack of incentive to buy from the distribution service instead of a used copy. For most products you lose something when you buy it from another person instead of the retailer. Digitally distributed software on the other hand, buying an already existing license gets you the exactly same thing as buying an original copy. It doesn't matter what the "intrinsic value" or whatever you want to call it reduces over the time, as it reduces the same amount from both the used and new copies. A better metaphor for this kind of appreciation could possibly be something going out of fashion.

[SealyStar]

*Prays US rules similarly in days ahead*