Comment by gambiting
3 years ago
>>What is Microsoft's position on you selling your windows license to a third party?
It's 100% allowed within the EU, even for OEM licences. There have been multiple court cases about this and microsoft lost every single one. But I guess that's not what you were implying?
I wonder why I can’t buy a game license in a similar way from somebody.
Because while the courts agree that legally licences are transferable, they haven't ruled that Valve and others should build a technical facility to allow this. Microsoft put themselves in this position by accident because they allow licence keys to be activated multiple times - so you're free to sell your licence to someone else and Microsoft has to activate it. While Valve can just refuse to build this functionality into Steam and no court has ordered them to do so.
This is incidentally often the real reason why big companies refuse to release seemingly 'obvious' features their customers would value.
Because of some adversarial legal precedent in a major market that would impair them more then the expected benefit.
Microsoft probably is moving away from selling permanent licenses partly due to this, for everything except those to large customers they can individually keep tabs on.
You absolutely can. If a game comes with a real license key (not an [insert platform here] activation/import key), you are entirely free to sell it the same way you can sell your Windows key.
Because of German court as always https://www.rockpapershotgun.com/german-court-rules-against-...
excuse is "games are art, not computer software Oracle vs Usedsoft doesn apply".
Hm, what's going to be the relevant factor, a lowest-level court decision from Germany or the EU rules and the (binding) decisions of the highest EU court interpreting them that the German court bases its decision on?
> "games are art, not computer software"
That's not the legal interpretation of the topic, no.
The data collection would also be illegal in the EU I presume.