I felt like I was a long long long hold out against steam, waiting until ~2009, because of these reasons. Giving up Right of First Sale because you happen to be using an online service is an insane trade off for convenience, & it makes me mad & sad society has abnegated it's property rights like this.
Now a days though I have 600+ games on Steam & wow it's just so nice to have, does so much. At least they made Linux gaming workable again.
Mark Lelmey's Terms of Use (2006) is - from what I can tell - the definitive write up on clickwrap licensing & the use of contract law in software to erode property rights to nothing. This framing defines our era, is what has allowed enshittification to begin & consume us; if we had rights & could modify things, there would be a possibility to resist the perpetual slide of software. https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=917926
> Unfortunately, Steam accounts and games are non-transferable
My layman's take is: what does it mean to "buy" a game on Steam? It's probably a personal licence. I suspect there is already case law on this because licensing of intellectual property is not new.
So, this might be a case of no-one testing this in court yet in the context of this specific scenario, which will end up confirming that existing case law applies... or not.
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[ 4.2 ms ] story [ 23.3 ms ] threadNow a days though I have 600+ games on Steam & wow it's just so nice to have, does so much. At least they made Linux gaming workable again.
Mark Lelmey's Terms of Use (2006) is - from what I can tell - the definitive write up on clickwrap licensing & the use of contract law in software to erode property rights to nothing. This framing defines our era, is what has allowed enshittification to begin & consume us; if we had rights & could modify things, there would be a possibility to resist the perpetual slide of software. https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=917926
My layman's take is: what does it mean to "buy" a game on Steam? It's probably a personal licence. I suspect there is already case law on this because licensing of intellectual property is not new.
So, this might be a case of no-one testing this in court yet in the context of this specific scenario, which will end up confirming that existing case law applies... or not.