You transfer the ownership of a disc.

EULA concerns the person who is the owner of the disk.

in Poland we have something called

exhaustion of the copyright after the insertion to the market (I really don't know how to translate this).

Which means basically, that after the copyright holder insert a copy of his work into the market, he cannot prevent from selling this copy to another person.

Which means that even if a singer is selling his music cds with a notice that it cannot be sold later, it's void and you are entitled to sell your cd after you get bored with it.

There are quite a few examples of people going toe to toe with Steam. And Steam quite often backs down. The problem that people won't enforce their rights is as long as mankind. There a whole businesses established around this. If Steam ever shuts down my account for no good reason, I will gladly drag them to court and I will win. And I know excactly what kind of damages I can make stick.

Most companies avoid courts like the plague, so I guess it will never come this far. And I don't expect any problems with Steam itself.

own as in 'cannot legally be taken away from you'. EULAs have always contained at least one clause saying something along the lines of your licence being subject to termination by the owner.

in other words, even your physical copies don't belong to you and the publisher could take your licence away from you. nobody knows how this could possibly work since it's never been done and it's never been challenged in court.

you cannot legally argue that you own your games so consequently, until further notice, you don't own them.

I should back up everything I own but in steam you can't. So I finally get this DRM shit, I mean it's just so easy (for some) to steal others account in steam, gg, whatever.
I didn't have had any problems much with gamersgate, well, I'm pretty and a new customer. But in arkham city after formatting, the game would work and save if you made offline-profile but I paid it so I must have it all otherwise I will not pay anymore. Well, they needed some screenshots and I send those, that new serial came fast though.

Well, after speaking gibberish again. Nowadays you just can't trust anything. I had my steam account automaticly sign in when I opened it so i had to make a new password.
Formatting this whole shit is a bit of a chore but I expect keys work after that. I'm rambling again.. Anyway, DRM-free and so on is the wisest thing to go.

If it really goes there where you need constant internet, it is sad. That should be reserved for multiplayer-shooters.

Anyway if you accidentally lock your e-mail and forget your password.
You own nothing.
Propably it can be solved but then again if you don't have internet anymore.

This is a good time to buy games, much easier than stuffing scratched discs in a drive and see errors.

Couple of times I have wondered if gog will go down, they better give me a good time to prepare. =)

I don't know how it is in Germany, but EULA provisions that forbid you from selling the game after using it are void.

You are guaranteed a right to sell your used game to somebody else in Poland. Even more, some lawyers say that any action that prevents it (like one use only activation keys or online passes) may be considered unfair business practice because they limit your ability to sell your used game.

Actually, I see how this could make sense. But this would mean that mean that the licence would be something which I can't translate (A german legal definition). But I'm honestly surprised if it would be that. But it could be different in Poland (and probably everywhere else, as german property law is somewhat unique).

why can't you? i have all (or most) of my Steam games backed up on an external hard drive.

after formatting, i just copy everything back and verify the files. done.

Thank you for that Phoenix, it's nice to know that there are still some around here who don't dilly dally on semantics and don't prance about the core issues of ownership and the like to rationalize their choices.

How does this work with retail Steamworks games? Because in Germany you don't have the "right to resell" (And it was the "Half Life 2 case", I don't have the details anymore, maybe I should look it up again).

I may be late to the party, but... They may say you "own it" in their marketing blurb, but that's all it is. PR speak to make them look cool. The fact of the matter is, you own games purchased here just as much as you own them anywhere else. You don't. You license the right to use it. That is all. Even when you purchase retail, all you own in that case it the materials used, i.e., the packaging, disc, paper used for the manual. You don't own the data stored on the disc, nor do you own the information printed on the packaging or in the manual.

Now, as for Steam...While you may even have a valid license to use the game provided by the Steam service, Valve still have total control over your access to it. They can, at their discretion, remove your access to any and all of your games at any time, be it by temporarily or permanently disabling your account, or restricting access based on your current IP address. And most of the time, they won't even warn you that they've done it. You'll have to find out for yourself after the fact.

no. physical copies of everything you bought (which was legal to be purchased in the first place that is) is yours. Publisher cannot take away your physical copies even if it was technically possible.

simplification isn't the answer, either.

ownership would mean you have the right to dissect or 'reverse-engineer' the games in your possession, modify without consent and even profit off your modifications. obviously, you're not allowed to do any of that without explicit permission, which is sometimes given but always at the cost of privileges.

and what happens if online activation is patched out? does that mean you suddenly own a game you previously didn't own, without any changes to the Terms of Licence?

i know that, but i doubt anybody cares about the value of the physical objects you get with a retail edition of a game. fact is you don't own the game on the DVD and your licence to use that game can be taken away from you. theoretically. like i said, this has never happened AFAIK, so whether it could be done and how is pure guesswork.

DRM changes all that, but it doesn't change the rules, only the fact that the holder of the rights can now enforce his Terms of Licence.

Well, as I've said, it's only a lawyers (doctrine) concern right now. None a single case was tried in Poland according to this issue, so I don't really know.

I added some more info to my previous post, you may be interested in it.