The US Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit today ruled (PDF) on a long-standing case involving used software on eBay, and it came to an important decision: if a company says you don't have the right to resell a program, you don't have that right. Could this mean the end of the resale market for all digital content? Yup. But the court says it had no choice.

If I am paying their outrageous prices, I better damn well own the software completely. Want me to rent it? Charge me less.

Someone really needs to challange this ont he basis that A) you're purchasing the physical medium B) in the store, it's processed as a sale and C) the EULA doesn't come into play until AFTER you have purchased it from the store; there's no way to agree to it prior to paying your money.

Don't be naive. You're not purchasing the physical medium for $50-60. You're paying for the IP contained on it. And as such, you can't possibly imagine that your $50-60 is purchasing full rights to the source code. Therefore, you must be licensing the IP, anything beyond that makes absolutely no sense.

And when it comes to data in a digital age, it's not unreasonable to ban the resale of data, given that the owner of the IP (not you) has zero guarantee that you have not made a copy of the data.

I fully support resale of the physical medium. Gouge that CD deeply, and sell the physical product as a coaster for fifty cents at a yard sale. Anything less than that, and you're reselling IP that you do not own, and the owner has not sold any transferable rights to you.

The argument that you have no way to see the EULA before purchase was a good one a decade ago. Now, the EULAs are generally posted online, and are boilerplate anyways and we've all had the opportunity to read ones that are just like it, so claiming that you were surprised that you weren't purchasing any transferable rights is pretty silly at this point when you own fifty other games with EULAs that also don't offer any transferable rights.

IIRC, I've read several EULAs that stated that you could immediately ship the full contents of the box back with a receipt dated within X many days of the shipping date for a refund if you don't accept the terms of the EULA, though I think that died out as the piracy caught up to the copy protection schemes.

What Kaffis said.

You aren't paying for a computer program, code, files, etc... you are paying for the right to play their game. If the terms of the purchase state that this right is not transferrable, then reselling should not be allowed.

At that point, the consumer will have to decide with their wallets if they want to support companies that apply this restriction to their games.

If gamestop died out I'd have zero video game stores within at least 20 miles of my house. I know it's the devil or whatever, but it sure as hell beats going to walmart or best buy or wherever else i would have to go if there wasn't one around. It's also by far the easiest place to reserve non big name games, and in some cases the only place to find them. Oh, and it's the easiest place to find older games that I'd forgotten about or just found out about.

Ironically enough, Jocificus, I'm not sure it does beat the hell out of going to Wallyworld or Best Buy.

Yes, it's the only place where it's easy to reserve upcoming games, but it's also a fairly evident truism that it's the place where reservations are most necessary, particularly for PC games. If they went under, you'd just see Walmart and Best Buy bump their orders up to compensate, and you'd still be able to get your games on release day.