European Court of Justice rules: You can resell digitally purchased software.

[Neil]

Anyone who accuses a civil law system court of "judicial activism" or "interventionism" uses the screen name 'Martinus' has no idea what he is talking about.

[Neil]

That the scarcity is not a function of the limitation of the ability to copy, but a function of the codes used for DRM.  Because GOG is selling old games that they've been allowed to sell without DRM, they can sell as much as they want.

GOG doesn't sell only old games.  If the codes are not actually purchased by the distributors it's not really relevant to what GF was saying.

They don't sell anything new that's AAA.

The digital distributors are assigned batches of codekeys, which can be depleted.  In order to get more, they have to get them from the publisher, which can take days or weeks.

[Neil]

Presumably they distrbute to the authors and composers (nwho are not necessarily the artists or distributors of the songs). They have pretty strong leverage in Germany. E.g. if you were to hold a public/commercial dance party you have to pay GEMA fees for the music played there. If you're not happy with that, YOU have to prove that the music you play is authored/composed by non-GEMA members (and this has been confirmed by legislation).

Sony and Universal in Germany have thrown hissy fits over GEMA blocking quite a few of their artists' videos on YouTube because GEMA thinks they don't get their fair share.

I think that they're going to try bringing this in in Canada.

[sbr]

That the scarcity is not a function of the limitation of the ability to copy, but a function of the codes used for DRM.  Because GOG is selling old games that they've been allowed to sell without DRM, they can sell as much as they want.

GOG doesn't sell only old games.  If the codes are not actually purchased by the distributors it's not really relevant to what GF was saying.

They don't sell anything new that's AAA.

The digital distributors are assigned batches of codekeys, which can be depleted.  In order to get more, they have to get them from the publisher, which can take days or weeks.

I believe they sold The Witcher 2 on release, though they are owned by the same company.

They also sold the PC version of Alan Wake very shortly after, if not right at, release.

Not sure if those fall into your new or AAA categories.

[Admiral Yi]

I've changed my mind about the ruling.  It's an unwarranted restriction on the freedom to contract.

[Neil]

You know, the idea that you're actually buying software rather than renting it does appeal to me though.  Surely the next step is to invalidate EULAs.

[dps]

You know, the idea that you're actually buying software rather than renting it does appeal to me though.  Surely the next step is to invalidate EULAs.

Well, the 2 ideas would seem to go hand-in-hand.  If you buy a product from a business, generally speaking you don't also have to buy a license to use if from that business.

[DontSayBanana]

Possibly, but how many variables are there for one game? There are like 25 different digits which can use either a number or a letter.  I'm not good at math and don't know how to figure how many possible codes there are for one game.  Hundreds of Trillions?  And even if they did, they could just get rid of the requirement.

Assuming that a 25-character key avoids easily-confused characters like "1" and "I" or "0" and "O," with an English alphabet, That's still theoretically 32^25 keycodes.  Keep in mind, though, that those aren't the only practical limitations.  A key's also going to avoid things like repeating blocks, directly linear combinations of characters, any key that composes of a single character repeated...

[Syt]

Part of the key is sometimes also a code for identifying the game itself, further limiting the combinations.

[Maximus]

As Neil pointed out it's a very specific subset of all the possible combinations. Otherwise it would be too easy to randomly generate a bunch of keys.

[Tonitrus]

They should just go back to code wheels....I'd always lose them anyway...so it would work against resale.

[DontSayBanana]

Part of the key is sometimes also a code for identifying the game itself, further limiting the combinations.

Sure, but that's actually less secure- pseudorandom keys can't be reverse-engineered, but hashes can.

[Neil]

Part of the key is sometimes also a code for identifying the game itself, further limiting the combinations.

Sure, but that's actually less secure- pseudorandom keys can't be reverse-engineered, but hashes can.

Yeah, but the game can't locally verify a random key, and if you're going to use an online connection, than keycodes aren't the best solution anyways.

[Tamas]

That the scarcity is not a function of the limitation of the ability to copy, but a function of the codes used for DRM.  Because GOG is selling old games that they've been allowed to sell without DRM, they can sell as much as they want.

GOG doesn't sell only old games.  If the codes are not actually purchased by the distributors it's not really relevant to what GF was saying.

They don't sell anything new that's AAA.

The digital distributors are assigned batches of codekeys, which can be depleted.  In order to get more, they have to get them from the publisher, which can take days or weeks.

I believe they sold The Witcher 2 on release, though they are owned by the same company.

They also sold the PC version of Alan Wake very shortly after, if not right at, release.

Not sure if those fall into your new or AAA categories.

worth noting that the pirated release of Witcher 2, was, by no surprise, the GOG edition.

[sbr]

That the scarcity is not a function of the limitation of the ability to copy, but a function of the codes used for DRM.  Because GOG is selling old games that they've been allowed to sell without DRM, they can sell as much as they want.

GOG doesn't sell only old games.  If the codes are not actually purchased by the distributors it's not really relevant to what GF was saying.

They don't sell anything new that's AAA.

The digital distributors are assigned batches of codekeys, which can be depleted.  In order to get more, they have to get them from the publisher, which can take days or weeks.

I believe they sold The Witcher 2 on release, though they are owned by the same company.

They also sold the PC version of Alan Wake very shortly after, if not right at, release.

Not sure if those fall into your new or AAA categories.

worth noting that the pirated release of Witcher 2, was, by no surprise, the GOG edition.

First why is that worth noting?

Second, coming from an expert....