A court in the European Union, which is a big thing in Brussels, has recently ruled that regardless of EULAs, buyers of games (and other types of software) are allowed to resell them. This also applies to downloaded software.

The fight against the sale of used games has been going on for some time now, and the big producers have realized that distributing games digitally is an effective way of stopping this. Most distribution services (both for consoles and PCs) tie the games to a personal account you cannot sell, nor do they open up for the reselling of individual licenses. However, Oracle recently filed suit against a German company which sold licenses for Oracle products without their permission ... and they lost. The recent ruling in the EU court found that these sales were legal.

For us gamers, this means that we are allowed to resell the license to a downloadable game (for instance if you have completed it) just as you can by taking your physical copy to a shop and selling it used. It does not matter what the user licences (EULAs) say about the matter. Many of these say excplicitly that you as a customer are not allowed to resell this copy/license on to someone else, but EU citizens may now (by law) ignore this. The ruling also seems to suggest that taking action to prevent this ... is in itself illegal. In other words, if you live in the EU and want to resell a downloaded game, any DRM preventing you from doing this is illegal.

So, what are the consequences of this? Right now, probably not much. As before, we are of course not allowed to make copies of our games or licences and sell those (which is as it should be), but the EU court has confirmed what I have been banging on about for years: we are allowed to do whatever we wish with the individual copies we do buy. Burn them, eat them, give them away ... or resell them.

This thing is about to get bigger, though. As it is, this ruling applies to the EU only. What, then, happens to distributors who are working on a global scale ...?