EU rules publishers cannot stop you reselling your downloaded games

[747-fan 19]

I think there's two sides to this: "I don't want to be told what I can and cannot do to a product I buy. It restricts my freedom". That argument is double edged, as the addon makers might as easily say "I don't like to be told what I can or can't put in my EULA. If you don't like that - don't buy it."

 

As for the support issue - I've bought secondhand cars before, needed a lot of help with those but never once have I assumed that the manufacturer will come to my aid on warranty issues. Of course not.

 

But that brings on the legal stuff, which sure makes my head spin!

 

EU law doesn't trumph US law, but does US law trumph EU law? I'm a bit curious about the international aspect of this all.

 

What trumphs what here? Is it

A: The product's country of origin (EG. Coolsky is Swedish/EU and PMDG is American)?

B: The online shop's server location/domain location (EG Aerosoft is German/EU and Avsim is US)?

C: The customer's location (I'm shopping from Norway, so I'm neither)?

 

And to complicate things, you can buy EU made products downloadable from US distributers, If I do that I'll have downloaded an EU made product from a US server onto a Norwegian computer. Phew...

 

I know you can write whatever you'd like below the "I agree-button" in the license agrement that nobody actually reads, but is it really valid no matter what it says and if so does it apply to people from all over the world? And why should they honor EULAs if they violate their local laws?

[Murmur 3,944]

I agree with the EU decision. To me, it seems fair to the end user.

 

Moreover, as has been said above, developers are perfectly free to stop support for reselled software.

 

Not allowing users to resell their software, would be analogous to not allowing people to resell used books or dvds.

[747-fan 19]

Well Murmur the difference to selling a secondhand DVD would be this:

 

If the lisence would be terminated instead of transferred, that's the equivalent of the publisher hiding in the bushes listening in to your sale and running up and scratching the DVD so that the new owner can't see the film he bought from you.

 

The more I think about it the less troublesome this law is for the companies.

 

1: Few want to sell their products, especially the good ones.The hoarding principle means that most simmers keep most (decent) products and wouldn't want to resell. Bad products get bad rep anyway, so sales will go down. That's capitalism at it's finest, bad products kill companies, good products don't. Make good stuff, and we won't want to resell them.

 

2: Being cooperative with lisence transfers makes the companies look good = good PR and more loyalty / more sales. You might even want to "re-invest" the money you earnt from the sales in other products from said company.

 

flight1 is a good example of a company that takes this to heart with their month long grace period. The refunds given are more than balanced out by the good rep and customer loyalty.

 

PR and loyalty being especially important in such a small community.

[jrhoads 6]

Ok lets look further. You buy it from us. You want to sell it. EU law says you can do that. OK, so you can.

But we will not support it because you are not the original purchaser and support does indeed cost us time and money and we pay people to do support. So what do we do? We lock the support forums down so that only an original purchaser can get support. Which is what has been happening as of late because there is a significant amount of people that pirate the software and come into our forums asking for help. Yes it costs us money. So we will have to apply the same logic to a "second party" sold product. You may sell the software, but we get nothing out of that sale to cover support. This whole ruling only makes it tougher for the end user, not easier. Because we and many others will cover our bases as a result.

[WarpD 824]

A really simple way to shut this idiocy down: Use the purchasing credit card number as the license number. Wanna sell your license?? Then you have to give them your credit card number. :)

[Shaka 2]

I realize that as Flight Simulation website, most of the logic in this forum is being applied to how this might affect FS add-ons. But try thinking of it in the broader Steam/Valve/etc. environment. One of the stipulations is that if I resell my game I have to remove it from my computer, and this would be hard to enforce.

 

But would it? Already, there are many games which require that I log in and authenticate myself to the internet in some manner. It would be quite easy to verify my license at that time. When the person I sold my game to registers it, it wouldn't run on my computer. Diablo 3 works this way. Say, doesn't Flight require me to log in? How about that...

 

So, maybe that is a possibility for add-on designers - require an internet connection at all times while flying. Always on connections are more common nowadays, unless you use dial up. I could be wrong, but I suspect these users are in the minority, so maybe it won't hurt your business to lose a few of them.

 

Or maybe you could keep the status quo and require me to authenticate my license when I upgrade your software. Several companies already do this. That way, if I sold my copy to someone who registered it, I would be "caught" if I tried to reinstall, and would be forced to buy a new copy if I really wanted it. I just don't think this is as bad for software companies as you may think, especially if you believe the claims of how widespread software piracy is (i.e., organized piracy is the much bigger problem for them, I think).

 

In any case, this seems to affect the EU for now, and I assume that some Euro-person will tell us if this affects an American company who wishes to conduct business online with a citizen of the EU located in Europe. I imagine it might, but I'm not the expert there.

[Matthew Kane 1,343]

A really simple way to shut this idiocy down: Use the purchasing credit card number as the license number. Wanna sell your license?? Then you have to give them your credit card number. :)

 

That would be a privacy issue as the software company would have a database of credit card numbers....if that led to a security breach then that would lead to legal troubles. The online companies I deal with do not keep records of credit card numbers and that is the way it should be.

 

A lot of these developers have low margins so the last thing anyone wants is legal troubles from the credit card companies for using their credit card numbers in that way. Remember that information is owned by the credit card company and not the card holder.

[Rich0 0]

Seems like many of the comments speculate that publishers will simply do stuff to make it difficult/impossible to actually use a resold copy, even if it isn't illegal. That is a pretty naive approach.

 

If publishers were to do this, the logical next step is that the same court would rule that circumvention tools are legal. This happened in Canada when US-based Satellite TV companies refused to sell service to Canadians. The Canadian government simply legalized descramblers and cloned smartcards and such, and with the creation of a market they took off, and of course that meant a big blackmarket supply for US-based customers as well.

 

The only things that make pirating difficult are customer goodwill, the fact that it takes a fair bit of effort to crack decent protection schemes, and that being illegal it is difficult to collaborate in such activities and hard to find servers to distribute these works or monetize them. Defiance of a court order will take care of all of these. It will tick off legitimate customers (denied a legal redistribution right), and will allow companies to operate in the open hiring people to break protection schemes and sell cracks for money and even advertise them on mainstream websites. Right next to your link to buy your software on amazon.uk you might be able to buy and download the crack.

 

The smarter move would be to ensure that your customers are able to exercise their legal rights. If a customer says they want to transfer the license, let somebody register a new key for the serial number and revoke the old one. Sure, that costs a token amount and generates no revenue, and maybe even is a lost potential sale, but there's nothing you can do about that. If you don't want people to resell your content give them a reason to want to keep using it.

 

Or, you can try to fight the courts. Just keep in mind that you need the courts on your side if you don't want to REALLY see piracy take off. Compared to more mainstream software industries flight simulator software piracy seems to be much less of a problem. Sure, the big products like FSX or X-Plane or whatever are more likely to be pirated, but there are a bazillion commercial add-ons that just aren't on the radar of the people who do this stuff. If you let them start getting paid for it, that will change.

[tf51d 284]

So, we cannot stop the resale of products, but we still have the rights to decide to offer support or not for resold items. Our current policy is not to provide support on products that are resold.

 

 

Actually the way I read it, I think it does require you to support a resaled product, as it effectively transfers not just the program but the license itself to the resale buyer.

 

"The ruling suggests that if you've bought a license for a game off your mate, you're within your rights to download it from the publisher's website. "Therefore the new acquirer of the user licence, such as a customer of UsedSoft, may, as a lawful acquirer of the corrected and updated copy of the computer program concerned, download that copy from the copyright holder's website," the Court said."

 

The only things that make pirating difficult are customer goodwill, the fact that it takes a fair bit of effort to crack decent protection schemes, and that being illegal it is difficult to collaborate in such activities and hard to find servers to distribute these works or monetize them.

 

We're not talking about pirating here. A legal resale under the new ruling would be one that you fully transfer the program and license to the new purchaser, removing the program and the license to use it from yourself. A pirate would just copy and distribute the program keeping the original for him/her self. That would still be illegal!!

[Rich0 0]

We're not talking about pirating here. A legal resale under the new ruling would be one that you fully transfer the program and license to the new purchaser, removing the program and the license to use it from yourself. A pirate would just copy and distribute the program keeping the original for him/her self. That would still be illegal!!

 

I agree that resold licenses are not pirating under the court's ruling. Perhaps I should have used the words "circumventing access controls" or something like that instead. My point was that trying to use DRM to block the legal resale of licenses is just going to result in a backlash that will make it harder to use DRM to block illegal redistribution of the software. If you lump people doing something that is legal with people doing something illegal courts will usually punish you for this.

 

This has happened numerous times. I cited the DirecTV / Canada situation. The same thing has happened to printer manufacturers who stuck bits of BIOS on printer cartridges (3rd parties were given the right to copy the firmware wholesale - since the printer would only accept an exact copy). This also happened to Nintendo with their gameboy - 3rd parties were actually allowed to display the Nintendo trademark without a license in a manner that would otherwise be obvious infringement because Nintendo made displaying the logo mandatory for the game to run (the console checked for the code to display the logo). When companies create shortages of important products governments will issue compulsory licenses.

 

The bottom line is that when companies try to play legal games to extend IP law to cover stuff that courts and legislatures have already ruled are legal, it backfires. They expect the courts to apply some narrow interpretation of past law as if they themselves were computer chips. You can't hack the law like it were a dumb finite state machine - if the intent of the court was to allow something to happen, then they're GOING to allow it to happen. If you play along with the court you make less money, and if you don't play along you make even less than that.

[tf51d 284]

The problem is this opens a can of worms for the publishers/developers. How can they verify a legal resale from a pirated copy? I'm sure the court hadn't considered that.

 

I'm sure this ruling, unless it's already at the top court (I don't know the EU Court structure) will be appealed, so it will probably be a few years yet til it's completely settled.

[Matthew Kane 1,343]

The issue I see with this is it is trying to make software follow the same rules as consumer products when it is different. If I manufactured a Dishwasher in Italy and I wanted to sell it, I would need EU and USA approvals (or any other countries), I would need distributors/retailers and it wouldn't matter to me if the end customer sold it to someone else or sold it with the sale of their house...etc.

 

Software is very different then this, you cannot pirate a dishwasher like you can pirate software code. Making it follow common consumer law isn't the way to go with this one.

[Rich0 0]

The problem is this opens a can of worms for the publishers/developers. How can they verify a legal resale from a pirated copy? I'm sure the court hadn't considered that.

 

I can think of a few ways. Create a form for the existing licensed user to log in and record their transfer of license. If you can validate the licensed user for the purposes of determining if an install should be allowed to run, then you should be able to validate them to allow them to transfer it. Maybe have an option right in the software to transfer a license. You run the command and enter a new owner email address. You get a confirmatory email, and once you click on the link the software is now owned by somebody else, and your existing copy becomes unregistered. As a bonus you can easily fix email address changes in this way as well.

 

If in a one week period of time 3000 people claim to have repurchased the same serialized copy of the software chances are something fishy is going on. On the other hand, if you get a request to transfer a license every few years on a copy, chances are that is legit. I don't think a court is going to punish a company for doing reasonable due diligence. What they won't accept is a company that just outright gets in the way of legal behavior, and so on.

 

I do understand the concerns of content creators, and I want to see more content created. However, the first sale doctrine is a good principle, and we should be willing to embrace it and try to make it work.

[tf51d 284]

This could create an administrative nightmare for the developers and quite frankly could put some of the smaller ones out of business!!

[WarpD 824]

So... who wants to volunteer to do all the tech support for all of these transferred licenses? Because the companies make zero off of the license transfer and thus don't get any compensation that would go towards cost of support.

 

Perhaps it's time FS developers stopped giving free support with their products? It's the only way to ensure that they support legitimate, licensed consumers and not lose income over someone selling their product to another person for change and a bagel.

 

This ruling opens a serious can of worms.

 

Ok... I had a 'rethink'.

 

Here's how I see this ruling...

 

1. I sell a license for my software to someone. Part of the cost covers expectations of support.

2. That same someone turns around and sells their license to someone else. I get nothing.

3. Someone else now expects support, but has paid me nothing.

4. The courts are saying this is all ok and legal.

 

I'm not so sure it is, legal that is. I'm certain it's not ok. I don't think the courts can require companies provide services for free, yet that is exactly what this ruling will do.