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Comment by ineedasername | Hacker News Reader

You can't resell your copy of Windows, I don't see how games are much different.

I think at least one likely result would be many fewer deep discount sales. Having them would allow a resell arbitrage as people stocked up at the low price in order to resell when the sale ends.

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Is there anything to stop you from reselling your retail Windows key? It's against Microsoft's TOS, but has an EU court ever verified that the restriction is actually enforceable?

As far as I'm aware, the answer is "no".

Why not? It's perfectly legal in the EU to sell any digital goods second hand as long as you stop using the software you sold.

I didn't realize that! Though in researching it, I found that the law allowing resell is somewhat linked to the original install media, i.e., you couldn't sell the license key and a backup copy. I don't see any EU cases that square this with digital distribution, but maybe this current ruling will provide guidance on that issue.

There was the famous Oracle vs UsedSoft lawsuit: https://www.theverge.com/2012/7/3/3134867/eu-court-of-justic...

This basically added jurisprudence that digital downloads can be resold provided that the original is made unusable.

Most software EULA say they are non-transferable, but that court order overrules it. That restriction has become meaningless. Interesting!

That case was one of the reasons that Adobe and Microsoft switched to a subscription-based model for their software suites.

That makes sense. I also saw some speculation that it's helped accelerate some vendors' efforts to convert customers to cloud offerings. On the other hand, I saw a very insightful analysis that thought vendors fighting this were being short sighted because annual maintenance can often be upwards of 20% of the initial license, and so recipients of second hand software would still be more than making up for the revenue in the not-so-long term.

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