Used Games are simply another form of Piracy (THQ joins EA to stop the used games market)

[oktalist]

IANAL but...

Not to mention, there are only so many years that can pass by before you're legally allowed to download and emulate out-of-the-market games.

Yeah, try fifty years [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abandonware#Copyright_expiration] at the minimum.

Reading comprehension... You should try it.
"that particular copy"
I spoke nothing of manufacturing licenses or intellectual properties. I spoke of the particular CD/DVD bought with the transaction, as well as the single set of data (that you do not have the right to copy or modify)

In fact, you do have the right to copy for archival purposes or to modify for any lawful purpose, provided you do not distribute said copies or modifications.

When they transfer ownership to you, you have to pay the department them whatever your car is worth, and within that amount some goes back to the manufacturer or in some way gets invested back in the company at least.

Copyright law already includes a droit de suite clause: professional intermediaries acting as resellers must pay a royalty to the original artist for every resale.

And if one private citizen sells her car to another private citizen, as often happens, no used-car dealership is involved and no manufacturer gets any money - just like with games or anything else.

Now if you buy a PC game... you buy a "liscence to play"... i know no one ever reads the wall of text of an agreement... but this liscence is not transferable. You agreed to it when you installed by something that is held up as a contract before courts. It's the law, period. That grey zone has been made black and white over 20 years ago with all software.

Case law disagrees:
Novell v. Network Trade Center (1997) "...purchaser is an 'owner' by way of sale and is entitled to the use and enjoyment of the software with the same rights as exist in the purchase of any other good. Said software transactions do not merely constitute the sale of a license to use the software."
Vernor v. Autodesk (2008) "...rejected the argument that Autodesk only licensed copies of its software, rather than selling them..." "...reseller was entitled to sell used copies of the vendor's software regardless of any licensing agreement that might have bound the software's previous owners because the transaction resembled a sale..."

The EULA or "shrinkwrap license" cannot deny you your statutory rights.

You buy a PC game and it's not really yours. Try to resell a copy of your PC game, and see what you get called.

Then how come I recently bought half a dozen pre-owned PC titles from GameStation?

I'll stop recycling (buying/selling) used games when the industry stops recycling and reskinning the same handful of games

Most sensible thing I've read all day.

As an aside, it is entirely legal to use a crack or other technological means to circumvent EA's serial mechanism for the purpose of exercising your statutory right to resell a game that you bought legitimately.

 

[Chibz]

[...] Publishers are in competition with each other, and engaging in a long bloody legal battle with gamestop (and any else who wants to defend their extremely profitable but unethical business) [...]still supporting the buy and sale of used games for exorbitant prices. Why?

Just because Gamestop's business model is exceptionally unethical doesn't make the entire industry unethical. Read my previous post.

I forgot to add this in the last post: I know for a fact that you can resell PC games like any other. The used game shop does this, themselves. No violation there.

 

[Bravo Company]

Because that particular copy has become the property of the buyer when it left the store.

Except, it hasn't.

If the game became entirely the property of the buyer when it left the store then piracy couldn't be illegal.

I could go home with the game I own, to the PC I own and use that PC to make 500 copies of the game that I own onto discs that I own.
And, as I owned everything involved their production, those 500 copies of the game would be entirely my property. I could then resell those 500 copies can make a tidy profit. Which would be entirely legal as I would entirely own everything I was selling.

you're wrong of course, you own the game, you don't own the copy right. Those are two separate and very different things and conflating them like that just muddles the issue. Under the law, EULA or no EULA, you own that disk and can do anything you want with it as long as it doesn't break any laws (in this case copyright infringement, meaning you can make back ups under fair use.)

Yes, you own the disc, of course you do, you just don't own the data on the disc.
If you blanked out the data on the disc first, you'd obviously be perfectly with-in your rights to resell it. The question only arises when you try and sell the disc with the data still on it.
Of course, as pointed out, some publishers do explicitly give you the right to resell if you don't retain any copies and, even if they didn't, the courts still support it.

But the point still stands, that even though you own the physical presence of the data, you don't own the data itself and, as such, you don't intrinsically own the right to resell it.

you mean just like the stores own the physical presence of the data and not the data itself? Retailers don't pay some special fee for the right to redistribute the games, it stands to reason I have to same right of ownership.

The store you bought it from never had to agree to the EULA though, they are selling an unused product, once you have installed it you signed that contract saying you don't own any of it, your just licensed to use it.

In no way am I saying that I support what EA is doing, but when you've signed that EULA you don't own the game.

 

[shadow skill]

-snip-

Excuse me, but why should the producers of content need to compete with retail? Retail should be happy to even have shit to sell. All this "first sale doctrine" bullshit does is give middlemen extensive rights to fleece the shit out of people who actually create something real.

I also like your revisionist history. Very cute stuff.

What revisionist history. The supreme court reaffirmed the lower court's ruling that the people renting out copies of movies purchased from the film studios had the right to do so. Just because you don't understand this does not make it revisionist. Content producers should enter into markets that may be profitable because they do not necessarily have the right to dictate the price of any given item. Regardless of whether or not they hold copyright or patents for the item. If they had that power under all circumstances they would effectively become the distributor themselves. At that point there would be no room for retailers outside of the publishers themselves.

Oh, I'm sorry, let me find that bit where you attempted to claim there was no extensive legal battle between studios and rental chains.

Except that isn't exactly what happened.

Ah, there it is. You then went on to describe some happy fun time version of the bloody legal battle which sent all involved studios into a downward spiral towards complete bankruptcy, while the rental chains survived, but the mom&pop rentals were steadily closed down or bought up by large chains, as they could no longer turn a profit. Hell, before this legal battle, supermarkets were starting to open rental outlets, and even those were turning a profit (wal-mart reconsidering used games).

Right now, we are at that exact point, except its video games and used sales instead of studios and rentals. Except, like I keep saying, no publisher wants to "take one for the team." Publishers are in competition with each other, and engaging in a long bloody legal battle with gamestop (and any else who wants to defend their extremely profitable but unethical business) in hopes of forcing them to give proceeds of all sales to the people responsible for creating what they're selling, would only benefit their competition. Thus, they're simply going with DLC, and invasive DRM schemes.
As far as killing the used game market, I fail to understand why there even is one. Unless you're some type of hyper anal tactile fetishist (who will eventually pay $17,000 for a bad atari game), why buy what you can get free in better quality? You've been harping on and on about the degradation of optical media (even though its irrelevant) yet you're still supporting the buy and sale of used games for exorbitant ices. Why?

First off if you are going to accuse someone of revisionist history you should quote them in full. Here is the full quote:

I didn't gloss over that. My point is that contrary to the idea that rentals harmed the movie industry it actually has ended up helping them.

Only after film studios sued the ever loving shit out of rental chains, forcing them to either buy rental licenses at ten times retail per copy, or hand over half of all proceeds.

Studios wanted to end renting completely, but rental chains had more money (logically) to spend in defense of their very existence than studios had to spend on theoretically increasing revenue.
So, what you're not understanding, why renting is utterly irrelevant to the issue of used games, why there will be no "happy happy sunshine sparkle revenue agreement" is there will be no costly legal battle (that will likely end more than one publisher) against the "used game" model of massive video game retailers. Not even mentioning how publishers benefit in the exact same way from rental chains as film dios.

Except that isn't exactly what happened. Because of First sale doctrine the people who opened up rental chains already had the right to rent out the movies purchased from the film studios. The studios deciding to get on board really meant very little in the end. Unless they decided to stop selling copies of their products to people these other folks were still going to be able to rake in huge amounts of cash. The reason that whole mess is relevant to this issue with video games is that resale is legal in the US because of first sale doctrine. The game publishers are never going to get rid of this market, so they should take a lesson from the movie studios and figure out how to turn used game sales into profit for themselves. All of this bs that they are trying to pull isn't actually going to get rid of the used game market. In the end they are just going to lose out on money that they could earn by entering the market.

EA might occasionally get ten dollars from a used Madden but anyone who sells a copy used is going to walk away with what amounts to a hundred percent profit. Gamestop will still in all likelihood print money with their scam, and even if they go under individuals will still resell games with ease.

The fact is that the supreme court did affirm the retail chains right to rent copies of movies. They didn't get that right after the movie studios gave it to them. The supreme court merely confirmed that they did indeed have that right. I didn't present some different version of history. Or are you going to tell me that, that ruling never happened?

For anyone interested here is a nice article on the Betamax case:http://www.museum.tv/eotvsection.php?entrycode=betamaxcase

 

[thublihnk]

I can't possibly get into this discussion without getting mad at the basic idea of the debate, so I will just leave you with this.

You are done with a couch. You sell the couch. This is not a problem. The designer of the couch gets no additional money. A console game is a physical product, and cannot be copied without illegal means.

If you're copying through illegal means, then it's just Piracy, and that's a whole other debate.

TL;DR, no, you're wrong.

 

[Stormz]

It's not another form of Piracy.

Second hand marketing has been around for ages, and nobody has complained about them before. We have all been OK with second hand stores for clothing, buying used Television sets, flea markets, the works. But now, because video game publishers say it's hurting the industry, it's suddenly wrong?

Fuck no, it's not wrong.

If I'm tired of something I own, something I either can't get enjoyment out of, or something if it's something I want to replace with something better, should I simply have to throw that thing away? Why can't I make a profit and sell it to someone else who needs it? Am I a bad person for helping someone acquire something they want for an even cheaper price than at the store? No, I'm not. I'm a good person for giving someone that opportunity.

Agreed.

Also where would I get all those old Ps2 games without buying them used? it's damn near impossible to find a good ps2 game brand new. Same with other older console games.

 

[shadow skill]

Because that particular copy has become the property of the buyer when it left the store.

Except, it hasn't.

If the game became entirely the property of the buyer when it left the store then piracy couldn't be illegal.

I could go home with the game I own, to the PC I own and use that PC to make 500 copies of the game that I own onto discs that I own.
And, as I owned everything involved their production, those 500 copies of the game would be entirely my property. I could then resell those 500 copies can make a tidy profit. Which would be entirely legal as I would entirely own everything I was selling.

you're wrong of course, you own the game, you don't own the copy right. Those are two separate and very different things and conflating them like that just muddles the issue. Under the law, EULA or no EULA, you own that disk and can do anything you want with it as long as it doesn't break any laws (in this case copyright infringement, meaning you can make back ups under fair use.)

Yes, you own the disc, of course you do, you just don't own the data on the disc.
If you blanked out the data on the disc first, you'd obviously be perfectly with-in your rights to resell it. The question only arises when you try and sell the disc with the data still on it.
Of course, as pointed out, some publishers do explicitly give you the right to resell if you don't retain any copies and, even if they didn't, the courts still support it.

But the point still stands, that even though you own the physical presence of the data, you don't own the data itself and, as such, you don't intrinsically own the right to resell it.

you mean just like the stores own the physical presence of the data and not the data itself? Retailers don't pay some special fee for the right to redistribute the games, it stands to reason I have to same right of ownership.

The store you bought it from never had to agree to the EULA though, they are selling an unused product, once you have installed it you signed that contract saying you don't own any of it, your just licensed to use it.

In no way am I saying that I support what EA is doing, but when you've signed that EULA you don't own the game.

Fair point, but those kinds of ultra constrictive EULAs are unenforceable because trying to enforce such bullshit is quite illegal. I've seen a few cases where EULAs were taken to court and the plaintiff won. If those EULAs were legally binding don't you think the second hand games market would've been sued out of existence by now?

You would think. But no we are just supposed to cry tears of blood for these publishers all while they keep giving shitty companies like Gamestop pre-order deals thereby increasing the number of customers they get...

 

[Druyn]

So they've equated second hand games to piracy?

I might as well start to pirate instead then.

Or, since the punishment for piracy is greater than the punishment for theft I could just steal the games.


This shit is getting out of hand...

This has always gotten to me. Why the hell are they telling us that stealing a game is the same as stealing a car, but you are still punished way more for stealing the game?

Well, not that it matters, since this going through basically makes buying used anything piracy. Cars included....

 

[Kingsman]

I don't want to hear shit about used games not adding any potential revenue to the multi-billion dollar industry of video games as is.

If I buy a vase from a millionaire, and my friend likes the vase at a yard sale and buys it from me, THE MILLIONAIRE DOES NOT DESERVE BALLS FROM A VASE HE LOST ALL RIGHTS TO WHEN HE SOLD IT.

Physical products are not intellectual property. This bullshit companies are talking about in terms of trying to get profit off of used games is a disgusting twisting of the natural order of economics.

Pardon my French, but I hate these whining assholes.

EDIT: alot of people are mentioning that when you buy a copy of a game - its all yours, but think about PC games. You buy a PC game and it's not really yours. Try to resell a copy of your PC game, and see what you get called.

I have no idea what the fuck you're talking about with this example.

 

[2012 Wont Happen]

As this sort of thing keeps happening, I feel more and more guilty about getting my games legally. I almost feel like it would be more moral to pirate games and not support such a ludicrous industry.

For the time being though, I suppose I will keep purchasing.

 

[Estocavio]

It would cost companies more to illegalise the distribution of pre-owned titles. As they would have to manufacture more new titles, and create some kind of enforcement team to keep everyone in check, and so and so forth.

 

[IxionIndustries]

Why can't we all just get along? Seriously...

Besides, it's not like EA ever makes any good games anyhow.. At least, not lately.

Also, how the hell do they make code that prevents games from working after they are sold? Does the game just not work if it's hit by any other disc drive laser?

 

[shadow skill]

As this sort of thing keeps happening, I feel more and more guilty about getting my games legally. I almost feel like it would be more moral to pirate games and not support such a ludicrous industry.

For the time being though, I suppose I will keep purchasing.

Sell on Amazon or Ebay or take out a Craigslist advertisement. There is zero need to go through Gamestop to buy and sell used games.

 

[2012 Wont Happen]

As this sort of thing keeps happening, I feel more and more guilty about getting my games legally. I almost feel like it would be more moral to pirate games and not support such a ludicrous industry.

For the time being though, I suppose I will keep purchasing.

Sell on Amazon or Ebay or take out a Craigslist advertisement. There is zero need to go through Gamestop to buy and sell used games.

good point.

I'll try to do that as much as possible

 

[PolarBearClub]

If EA want to make a big deal out of it, they're going to have to provide a reasonable alternative to people buying games second hand.

For instance, after X amount of months, rerelease the game at a discounted price. yEt there would then have to be an incentive for people to pay full price, rather than hold out until the price dropped.

And it is possible to compare a game to something like furniture or a car. All can depreciate in value if you think of it. For games this is due to the increased popularity of online gaming. If you buy, say, Call of Duty: World at War after the next Treyarch installment arrives, you can presume that the amount of online players will be significantly depleted. Therefore you are receiving less of an experience than you would have had you bought the game closer to its release. It may also become difficult to get certain achievements or complete a co-op mode with the lack of players currently around. You may effectively only get half the experience the game can actually provide.

 

[Death on Trapezoids]

I wonder how long before the boycotts start.
This sounds fun.
Sign me up!

 

[Call Me Arizona]

I'll say what I've been saying all along.
Why doesn't the games industry just ask for a slice of the second-hand pie instead of blaming the gamers?
Not saying I agree or disagree that it's like piracy, I'm still forming an opinion on that.