Slashdot Mirror
Valve Sued In Germany Over Game Ownership
An anonymous reader writes "The Federation of German Consumer Organizations (VZVB) has sued computer game distributor Valve because it prohibits Steam-gamers from reselling their games. Steam users own the games they purchase and should be able to resell them when they want to, just like owners of traditional card or board games can, said Carola Elbrecht, project manager for consumer rights in the digital world at the VZVB, on Thursday. But while those traditional game owners can resell their games whenever they like, Steam users often cannot, she said."
Shame I can't transfer it to another article...
The biggest drawback, as I see it, is longer term not being able to pass the games on to family/friends to play. Perhaps an option is to have a higher tiered pricing which gives you the ability to resell the game later?
Physicist, consultant, science communicator
Back in the days when you bought games individually, you could share them around the household. So if I had bought say, a copy of unreal tournament 3 and call of duty 2, I could play one, and my wife could play the other on her pc (real example! if you prefer, substitute mate or brother for same effect)
Now, with two online game equivalents on my steam account, we can only play one, as both require being online. Even if it came in a box from retail for cash, you often still end up with a steamworks copy. Just giving my wife access to my steam account so we can juggle offline mode between us violates the ToS which theoretically means they can shut down my account and deny access to all my games, or make most of them non playable online with a VAC ban. Same applies for creating a new steam account for each game; not only would that be a giant pain in the ass, but trying to register the same card for multiple accounts risks the lot getting disabled.
They already have the ability to transfer licences between accounts with the gifting system, there's no reason I shouldn't be able to transfer my games to my wife so she can play them when I'm done with them, other than greed.
Remember kids, it's all fun and games until someone commits wholesale galactic genocide.
I think it's even worse when they're disallowing physical media. I specifically purchased a game for my son (Portal) so that when he was finished playing it, I could uninstall it from his computer and install it on mine so I could play. But, even though it was purchased at a store (Wal-Mart, Target, something like that), and it came on a physical disc, uninstalling it from his computer is not enough. It's already been registered and locked to his Steam account, and after several communications with Valve, they refuse to disassociate it from his account.
If it was just a download, then I could sort of, kind of see the restriction. But purchasing a physical object, like a book or a DVD or a CD-ROM, should allow one to disassociate the application from one account and sell it on to the next person to associate with their account.
I'm not an actor, but I play one on television.
In the west, Communism is decried in part because it doesn't respect the concept of personal property. None of 'your' stuff is owned by you. So why, given that, should we accept for even one second a culture where we only rent and license things from corporate owners? We can't even be said to own the license since there are so many ways a 'permanent' license can just evaporate.
As a Finn I have waited for this to happen somewhere in Europe. I guess the legislators don't play games or at least buy them from Steam. I hope that this changes how digitally distributed games are seen in light of ownership before every purchase is somehow locked to buyers dna. Tinfoil hats ahoy! :)
Contrary to popular belief not all things put on licenses are enforceable and not all rights are possible to give up in exchange of a cheaper deal(essentially this is the whole basis of consumer protection laws).
OTOH.. it's technically possible to sell your steam games. you just have to sell them all at once(sell the account. you can change the realname if you ever put one in..).
world was created 5 seconds before this post as it is.
Yeah, but if the law in Germany says otherwise, then it is the law that applies. That's the difference between laws and contracts (of which a license agreement is just a small part) and it's actually impossible to have a contract to break the law; contracts must be lawful or they are simply not contracts by definition. Even if the agreement says that it is not conducted under German law, German consumers will have the right to use German law anyway. (Well, probably; I've not actually checked what the relevant law says, but there's a lot of similarity in this area across different EU members and I know that UK law is very clear on this point.)
The real question is not whether there's recourse in law, but how any ensuing judgements would be enforced. An unenforceable ruling really isn't much use.
"Little does he know, but there is no 'I' in 'Idiot'!"
Hurrah for posting before reading the whole article and the article's sources. So the ECJ (I guess Europe's equivalent of the US Supreme Court, correct me if wrong) determined that licenses can be transferred, even for downloaded software. The exclusive right to control distribution of a copy is exhausted on it's first sale. So even though this group suing Valve lost in 2010 over a very similar issue, they will likely prevail after this new ruling by the ECJ. Nice going Europe, I only wish we could convince US courts to follow the same reasoning.
Not being able to resell a game is nothing compared to the fact that we can lose all our games anytime with Steam. The license agreement say that Steam can change it whenever they want for whatever they want and if we refuse the new license agreement, then the only option is to close the account and lose all the games we "bought". No refund. We own nothing with steam and considering the current license agreement contains clauses which are clearly abusive (they can do whatever they want with whatever information they can gather from their spyware, err... I mean client software), I'd say Steam is one of the most evil company I ever saw.
No. It's Germans who make a contract with a german outlet of Valve, following german law. If Valve's infrastructure is not able to handle the problem, they shouldn't do business in Germany. And a change in an EULA does neither change a court verdict nor a law in Germany. The new EULA has to adhere to german law too, and german law says that either Valve rents the game or it sells it, so either the legal framework of a rent or that of a sale applies. No EULA can change this legal fact.