StingingVelvet: So the whole time you were telling me boxed retail games do not have contracts or agreements you accept, and that you OWN the game and can do what you want with it, you were speaking from a position of legal theory on your part, not of fact? You were actually outright stating facts you knew were not true, i.e. there is no agreement when you buy retail, in order to be clear on your theoretical legal challenge of an EULA?
I was coming at the matter from a practical standpoint at the beginning of the discussion, although we then veered into the kind of legal discussion I had initially intended to avoid. I'll fully admit that I didn't differentiate my statements regarding practical vs legal positions to an adequate degree, and apologize for any confusion that may have caused. However, I should also point out that most of our discussion was about copyrighted goods in general (with software EULAs coming in specifically only at the very end), and with regards to ownership of copyrighted works in general I stand by all my previous statements, and shall explain momentarily.
StingingVelvet: As pointed out very clearly, every game and piece of media you have ever played was licensed to you. Common sense tells you that you do not own a multi-million dollar game. You can argue this needs to be tested further in court, but the simple fact is courts will uphold these principles if past copyright verdicts are anything to go by.
Survey says you should actually read up on past copyright decisions before demonstrating your woeful level of ignorance. A fairly recent one is
UMG v. Augusto, where even though promo CDs were clearly marked that they could not be resold the court ruled that the person who legally possessed the CDs owned them and was free to resell them, and that UMG had no right to restrict such a sale. A similar recent decision involving patents is
Quanta v. LG Electronics. Now if you want to go back to the very beginning of the first-sale doctrine you can read up on
Bobbs-Merrill Co. v. Straus. This was also reaffirmed specifically in the case of DVDs in NEBG v Weinstein. So despite your uninformed assertions, the matter of ownership and right to resell copyrighted works is pretty clearly established for almost all copyrighted works. It's only in the specific case of software and EULAs that courts are having trouble making up their minds. So do you own and can you resell copyrighted works in general? Hell yes. For copyrighted software? It depends. On what? A whole shitload of things, and you have pretty much no chance of making an accurate prediction at the moment until your specific case ends up in court. That's from a legal perspective; from a practical perspective you own any software that's not tied to a service and you're perfectly free to resell it.
And now that that's finished with hopefully there will be no further need to discuss legal theory, as settled legal matters are boring and unsettled legal matters have little practical application in a general sense.
