this post was submitted on 13 May 2026
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Steam Hardware
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I use Steam but Gabe was one of the original tech feudalists.
Valve ignores the First Sale Doctrine, a law for over a hundred years. So now instead of being able to resell your games for whatever amount you want, your games are forever under the control of Valve.
Yeah I agree but that maybe more to the publishers not allowing that that to me would be achieved through regulation just like with the refunds. First sale was not something publishers wanted just a feature of having physical media. Also there is a myth that all steam games are DRMed. There are may games that run without steam being open but that is up to the publisher. Stuff like family sharing they added is them bring value to customers while walking a fine line with the publishers.
It's not up to publishers. Publishers tried to put a disclaimer on books preventing cheap resale. The Supreme Court struck it down and it was written into law over 100 years ago.
The problem is first sale doctrine applies to the physical media which carries the license of its own content.
And yet even DVDs have a bullshit screen about "license to the content blah blah" and bullshit like region codes
No, the problem is that people believe "[concept] on a computer" is somehow magically different from "[concept] IRL" when it's not.
When you buy a game from Steam, you buy a game, not a license, and the First Sale Doctrine applies just as much as it does if you buy a board game from Walmart. Any claims to the contrary are simply lies, and any government support for such lies is simply tyranny.
That's a matter of law, and you have to convince the government to update the law accordingly
It doesn't need an update, it needs enforcement. The law is about copyright holders losing rights at time of sale, not the specific media that the copyrighted material exists on.
The EU enforced their first sale doctrine on Valve.
The physical media is whatever is playing the content. The law doesn't specify the media.
1909, one year after the Supreme Court ruling: "Your honor, I know that the Supreme Court ruled that publishers can't add a shrink wrap license that prohibits cheap resale of copyrighted work but you see, I delivered the content on llamas where it was printed onto scrolls at the customer's home so the law doesn't apply. You wrote the laws thinking about trains and ships transporting books and I use neither."
Yes that's why you can buy software and sell the computer with the licenses following along it, assuming you don't keep copies separately
Yeah... virtually every software license disagrees with you. You can't transfer a steam account, you (according to Microsoft) can't even transfer the OS license.
Personally I agree that we should be able to do so, but that exactly what is being argued - publishers are ignoring first sale doctrine
FYI it doesn't matter what the license says if the law disagrees
It's called renting. A thing for over thousands of years.