Doom972 said:
tangoprime said:
Apparently, Germany doesn't get how software licensing works...
Apparantly, you don't realize that it doesn't have to be this way.
OT: I'm a fan of Valve and I love Steam, but I'm glad that someone is trying to get them to change that policy. There are definitely some games on Steam that I'd love to trade/sell.
I'll just say what the guy in the post below your post said on it.
"Licenses ARE valid legal instruments, at least everywhere I know.
With Valve (and everyone else should do it too) you are made aware of what you're buying (a personal, intransferable license) before the trade is made.
Before every purchase is made through Steam, you are required to read and agree to the Terms of Service (which are a contract specifying the terms under which Valve shall offer you the service you're about to acquire). I don't really know what country you live in, but a contract (which EULA and Terms of Service are) should always be valid, except when it goes against the law."
I'm definitely on the side of the consumer's total rights over a physical item, including a game when you own the disk. But getting into consumer ownership of digitally distributed software is a bit iffy, and I don't like the idea of an aftermarket in intangible, digital copies of software. All that'll do is further infuse DRM into everything, to be sure when someone sells a piece of software, they've completely removed all traces of it from their system and no longer have access to it. More realistically, I just see software companies refusing to sell software to a jurisdiction that imposes some kind of laws to that effect.
Also, when you buy digitally, and agree to that software license agreement, you DON'T OWN IT, you agreed that you don't own it when you bought it, so you have no standing to sell it, or argue about "your rights" over it, you already agreed on the terms as part of your transaction. To legally remove the ability for software companies to use that kind of license agreement would completely muck things up for the biggest software market in the world, that is, business productivity software, and as mentioned, I think companies would just choose to not license or sell their software in those jurisdictions, or else impose draconian DRM, devote a lot of effort to enforcing violations, and pass that cost on to the business customer.