EU rules publishers cannot stop you reselling your downloaded games

[Yahooligan 0]

No one said they purchased the copyright, and that isn't what EU was talking about. They clearly purchased DLC as a license. And your analogy with a book is far different than a piece of software. The book is a physical item that in fact changes hands. Once you sell the book, it is undeniable that you no longer own it. But, If that person copies the book before selling it, then they have committed copyright infringement. The EU can claim all day long you can resell your DLC all you want. So what? People have been doing it all along for years. No one has stopped anyone from doing just that. This ruling has no impact on whether people will stop or not. Its going to happen irregardless. But whether or not any developer will actual "listen" to this is up to them. And I seriously doubt their ruling will stop developers methods of protecting themselves from illegal sales of their intellectual property, especially when it violates their license agreement. It will have absolutely no impact on how I do business.

[Tom Allensworth 1,532]

I would be interested to hear from someone who actually knows what they are talking about on this.

 

That's a fairly provocative statement in the context of the response to Yahooligan don't you think? What makes you think he doesn't know what he's talking about?

[NathanHalley 0]

That's a fairly provocative statement in the context of the response to Yahooligan don't you think? What makes you think he doesn't know what he's talking about?

 

You misunderstood my tone, so I apologize. I should have stated that it would be interesting to hear from an EU lawyer who can appropriately clarify this ruling for us from a position of understanding all the laws involved.. I'm assuming that neither Yahooligan, or you, or me, are that, so we really don't know for sure what we are saying. Perhaps I was wrong, and he is that. And, for the record, I was fully including myself in that.

 

If anyone is that, who has legal expertise on this subject, including Yahooligan, that's who I'd like to hear from. And if someone in here is that, I'd be happy to rescind my statement.

[Tom Allensworth 1,532]

You misunderstood my tone, so I apologize. I should have stated that it would be interesting to hear from an EU lawyer who can appropriately clarify this ruling for us from a position of understanding all the laws involved.. I'm assuming that neither Yahooligan, or you, or me, are that, so we really don't know for sure what we are saying. Perhaps I was wrong, and he is that. And, for the record, I was fully including myself in that.

 

If anyone is that, who has legal expertise on this subject, including Yahooligan, that's who I'd like to hear from. And if someone in here is that, I'd be happy to rescind my statement.

 

Great... Thanks for clarifying. Any light sabers that were raised can now be put back in their sheaths. :p0503:

[NathanHalley 0]

Great... Thanks for clarifying. Any light sabers that were raised can now be put back in their sheaths. :p0503:

 

Okay, good. I was not trying to be provocative at all. My phrasing was just poor. I honestly don't know what the "truth" is here, and so many games can get played with these words that it is really hard to know WHAT something like this actually means.

[Steve Halpern 176]

I think the question that needs to be answered, though, is what if you are a US based developer that is selling to the EU. For example, Microsoft has to make different versions of Windows to comply with EU laws because they want to do business in the EU.

 

I believe I read that the law only applies to sales where the *source* of the sale is in an EU state. For example, if a product is sold to an EU customer, but the ORIGIN of that sale came from non-EU based servers (the purchase was in non-EU currency and the servers were in a non-EU state), the law would not apply. I do not think it matters if the developer of the software is in the EU or not, if the software is published and completely handled sales-wise from a non-EU state. Oracle for example has an interest in the EU, may have offices there, sales staff there, etc, so it is different. I do not think you could fan out an make, for example, a USA based publisher of download products responsible to police any laws that exists in a developers home state/country/province, etc... Like what if you had 4 developers spread across the globe, and they all contributed to a title that is published in the USA.

 

I think this whole thing will likely serve to clarify things, rather than destroy small businesses. Logic will likely win in the end, meaning, all the corners will be examined in this issue and EU lawmakers may make adaptations, to a degree, to a reasonable level. May take a year though.

[bva_davis 0]

Ok how about this idea, Years agai I was part of a developers group working on a POS Software package and I was incharge of impliment some form of access control for paying customers only. The idea that followed was this.

 

1. After customer bought software and had activated it, he was required to reactivate the software every 15 days or the software would not run.

 

2. All upgradeas and add-on that the developer offered was to be paid for first then installed last. Reactivation required after install.

 

4. If key was reused the software was useless.

 

by the way this software was being sold for over $150,000.00 a copy. [Wal-mark was only company to look at it.] I was let go for being overzelous with security protcols on the software.

[Rich0 0]

by the way this software was being sold for over $150,000.00 a copy. [Wal-mark was only company to look at it.] I was let go for being overzelous with security protcols on the software.

 

Seems a bit odd for software in this price range. I've seen expensive software that requires dongles or license keys, or even annual renewal. 15-days seems a bit crazy. I've been involved with software packages at work that we've paid 7-figure sums on licensing for, and we'd never deploy something that needed some kind of intervention every 15 days. I think SAS was one of the more intrusive things I've seen, and they can get away with it only because they're basically the gold standard (and if we asked them nicely they'd probably give us a grace extension while we're haggling over prices). Could you see Walmart distributing keys to every cash register in the country for the biweekly security check?

 

Keep in mind that the people who are paying you aren't your enemy. A vendor approached us with plans to move to a license server model due to piracy concerns in the East, but they were very sensitive to customer reception, and would bend over backwards to keep it out of the way. Unless you are the only game in town you really can't afford to tick off people. Granted, I work for a big company and even very large companies have to agree to stuff like audits and source escrow to do business. I imagine a mom-and-pop company wouldn't get the same treatment.

 

In any case, I think the more successful add-on vendors already realize they have to work WITH their customers to have customers. Most bend over backwards to provide support and that is part of the overall experience. I think that the bottom line with a ruling like this is that vendors will need to provide a basic license-transfer mechanism in their registration system, will need to explicitly limit support duration, and that's really all. They'll also need to make sure replay value is good so that they're not clobbered by the secondhand market.

[scott967 62]

If the 9th circuit makes a ruling, the ruling applies nationally.

 

 

The devil is in the details. How are these unrestricted transactions going to be allowed? Does this also apply to D/L music or video purchases? It has been my experience, anytime the government or courts become involved in commerce, the law of unintended consequences grows exponentially. Can an EU citizen sell D/L software to an American or vice versa? If I were a software developer, I might have to consider not selling in the EU. Then what? Software developers have made the rules in order to be able to stay in business. This ruling changes that.

 

Well the USSC has accepted a case on appeal from the Second Circuit for the upcoming term JOHN WILEY & SONS, INC. v. Supap KIRTSAENG, doing business as Bluechristine99 dealing with the question of a work sold overseas and imported into the US for sale on e-Bay, whether first sale applies.

 

For d/l music in the form of mp3 files, there is a outfit ReDigi with a business plan of reselling "used" music downloads. They were sued this Feb in the USDC for the Southern District of NY in CAPITAL RECORDS, LLC v. REDIGI INC. At this point, a motion by Capital Records for a preliminay injunction has been denied by the court. The merits have not yet been argued.

 

scott s.

.

[Raindance 25]

You misunderstood my tone, so I apologize. I should have stated that it would be interesting to hear from an EU lawyer who can appropriately clarify this ruling for us from a position of understanding all the laws involved.. I'm assuming that neither Yahooligan, or you, or me, are that, so we really don't know for sure what we are saying. Perhaps I was wrong, and he is that. And, for the record, I was fully including myself in that.

 

If anyone is that, who has legal expertise on this subject, including Yahooligan, that's who I'd like to hear from. And if someone in here is that, I'd be happy to rescind my statement.

For the record, that's how I understood your post to mean ;)

[fenixtucu 0]

Well, strictly speaking, apart from the fact that this was said by the European Court of Justice, there is nothing new in this notice. It is all about an old principle called "private property". The Court just reinterpreted the limits of "private property" right.

 

Nobody can tell you that you can not sell a "thing" (whatever it is a house, a car, a right, or a piece of software) that, after the purchace, was introduced into your own domain. DLCs are unconstitutional in that part of the agreement. This kind of clauses are very common in adhesion contracts (contracts were a party just have to accept -or not- a preset agreement, but can not modify its clauses, like credit card agreements). But they are commonly unconstitutional too.

[scott967 62]

In the US, most sales of goods are covered by state law, iusing a model law known as the Uniform Commercial Code or UCC. At one time there was a push by software publishers in the US to amend the law by adding a new article covering software "licenses" which was viewed by many consumer groups as too one-sided. I think that effort has largely stalled. But in the US, copyright is a matter of federal law and takes priority over the UCC, so one has to look to the copyright law for guidance in addition to the UCC. In the US we also have law inherited from England known as the "common law" which can be used in state cases, in particular in the matter of trademarks, but there is no concept in the common law of "copyright".

 

scott s.

.

[Swoop 0]

Do you think that we should look at the stand the EU is making from the perspective of the corporate privacy pirates that exist in the world today? In my opinion, they are far more dangerous then people who ripoff content. This maybe one way to confound the process of your personal information being sold whole sale to anyone who has the money to buy it.

 

I personnaly would love to see that process confounded if possible and this could be a valuable first step.

 

Mark

[robert young 2,897]

Withdrawing support is a rather weak weapon in countering software transfer or sale. Most sim software works without the need for support so the new user hardly needs any and if he did, he can already find it on public forums. If withdrawing support means not activating or re-activating a second hand product then it might be more relevant.

 

The crucial key here is whether the first user is able to still use the software after selling it on. Unless there are draconian activation restrictions I cannot see how any developer could enforce a restriction on the original user without making things so awkward that no one would purchase in the first place. That is where the EU ruling fails, because it assumes that the original user will NOT be using the software after disposal, but who seriously believes that, except where the software is lousy in the first place, in which case it would not really be saleable as a second hand item in the first place.

 

Say someone buys a Mercedes and is able to clone it, sell the clone on and still use the original Mercedes. That is EXACTLY what happens with sold on software in most cases. The EU ruling fails to recognise the fundamental difference between a physical object and a virtual one. You simply cannot treat the two things as equal, or disposable, in the same way.

 

Any candid developer will tell you that piracy is epidemic in flight simulation software, and I believe it is pointless trying to sweep this under the carpet. It has almost become a taboo subject on the front pages of sim software sellers. I think it would be healthy to talk about a typical personal profile of an average pirate. They are not spotty youths operating from a squalid bedroom in an urban backwater. Many pirates are middle class with high or medium-high incomes. They are certainly not deprived and they tend to be intelligent, educated and savvy.

 

The most crass of the pro-pirating twisted arguments is "if I had to pay for it I wouldn't buy it anyway so I would never be your customer, so I'm not affecting your sales". Another attempt at engineering ridiculous pseudo-logic is saying "by pirating your software I can assess it, tell others how good it is and then they'll buy it, so I'm helping you market your product". These ludicrous expressions of denial get more and more bizarre year by year. None of them hold up and they are completely absurd.

 

A not atypical pirate we pinned down was a high ranking IT specialist earning around $100,000 in a well known software giant. His excuse was that he was "sick and tired" of buying sub-standard software so his policy was to pirate everything until he was personally satisfied that the software met his standards. Only then, he said, would he pay. I hardly need to discuss the fundamental flaws in his logic, but that's what pirates do. They seek to explain basic theft by obfuscation, twisted logic, and pseudo-justifications.

 

The plain fact is that they stole stuff. Not only do they do this, but as pointed out in another post, they sometimes actually have the bare-face cheek to suggest they deserve "lifetime" support. They often also can be the loudest voices complaining about software in some public forums. Some pirates will never contact the developer direct because they'd be found out, so they vent their anger publicly, hiding behind their login name. Of course they are a minority here but I assure you they do exist.

 

Faced with this deluge of piracy masquerading as "testing the product", "assessing its worth", "trying before buying", many developers have to take drastic actions, starting with registered product access only to forums, and ending with double or triple activation. At this point, the honest majority quite understandably object. So the developers back off and live with it.

 

There is little one can do and perhaps the only effective way, if piracy can be traced, and it's not that difficult, but it is difficult to prove beyond doubt, is to apply social pressures, similar to that applied in small communities where acts of theft or socially unacceptable behaviour is practiced. That pressure is to deem the pirate to be socially outcast, disapproved of, morally condemned and roundly censured by his peers. But to achieve this would likely include mis-identification, wrongful accusations and mistakes.

 

All the Eu ruling has done is mistakenly and perhaps unwittingly given thieves another weapon to add to their armoury of bent logic. The worst offenders use up all their activations to distribute their software to family, friends and casual online acquaintences, then have the temerity to ask for re-activation, not once, not twice but in some cases we've dealt with, five times or more. In fact, some "customers" have requested activation more times than we ourselves have activated our own products while developing and testing them!

 

There is no obvious answer, and in the face of total lack of legal redress or support from almost all governments, never mind the EU, socially outcasting pirates is perhaps the only viable reaction, bland though it might sound.

[Rich0 0]

Any candid developer will tell you that piracy is epidemic in flight simulation software, and I believe it is pointless trying to sweep this under the carpet.

 

I suspect this is due to the nature of the market. People who are into flight simulators probably tend to be far more technically inclined than the average computer user, and those who want payware add-ons that make the simulation even more complex probably are even more technically skilled. With those skills comes the ability to find/use or even create pirated software. That doesn't make it a good thing - but it is one of the reasons this industry is likely to struggle with piracy.

 

You mentioned activations, and the kind of user who buys flight simulator add-ons is also the sort of person who is likely to need lots of activations for completely legitimate reasons as well (changing hardware, re-imaging hard drives, and so on). Personally I don't care for software that depends on internet activation servers, since they're a potential future point-of-failure. However, I am guessing that developers find that they sell more when they use this stuff, so that's just the nature of the beast. Just as many pirates might indeed never buy the product if it weren't free, many developers might never build the product if they couldn't squeeze out some additional sales by using more intrusive copy-protection.

 

I wish there were a better solution out there, but we all enjoy a hobby that is relatively rare in the population, but which is fairly expensive to cater to, which means that if we want to keep it going it is going to cost a fair bit of money.