This comes as good news at a time when publishers are waging their sacred war against second-hand games. Since this sets a precedent, I'd like to see EA or Ubisoft trying to stop gamers from selling their games after they finished playing them.

I have to say, the ECJ has been quite good for us gamers lately. Not only this news, but other decisions defending a free internet for all. Now we just have to wait for the ACTA ruling.

"Advocate Bot stated that "in the event of resale of the right to use the copy of a computer programme, the second acquirer cannot rely on exhaustion of the right to distribute that copy in order to reproduce the programme by creating a new copy even if the first acquirer has erased his copy or no longer uses it.""

Can someone explain this part?

Is that like saying 'if you sold your GOG game to someone then the new rightsholder does not have the right to download a copy off GOG even if the original rightsholder doesn't have a copy anymore' ?

It means that even though the transferring of used software is legal regardless of whether or not that means one treats what was sold as a license or a product, that the process of transference does not necessarily allow for a copy to be made - i.e. I can give someone a Disk with my copy of the software on it, but for say purely digital products, I can't duplicate and then delete. That's my reading of it.

This is awesome news!

Pretty much - more like, if I buy the GOG, the other party cannot simply duplicate-then-delete when giving it to me because that involves a part where there is more than one copy having been made. It basically makes it impossible to do used sales on DRM-free, digital only software (like GOG) - which I'm actually ok with. This does mean though that software on physical media and software protected by DRM can be re-sold legally as long as the process to do so doesn't involve copy-delete.

Which is a huge victory for consumers!

Ahh I see.

But.. then that's basically an affirmation of what people have held as their right for ages now already isn't it?

Would this even apply in any way to digital retailing then? It doesn't sound like there's any way to transfer a copy of the game. Burning something is copying it and deleting it. Moving it to another hard drive is copying and deleting it. Basically any way of transferring it, except handing over the media it's downloaded on (USB stick or something) sounds like it would violate this ruling.

Actually I think the court case was in relation to digital retailing. For DRM-free digital media, in any practical sense I agree that I can see no method around copy-delete (not saying there isn't one, I just can't think of one, not quite the same thing :P). I don't think the ruling was necessarily saying it is illegal to do copy-delete, but it isn't protected either (though it could be saying you can't do it). That means a company which owns the rights to the products could allow its users to transfer DRM-free digital media, but doesn't have to.

For DRM-protected digital media, someone can create a process to transfer the license which would not be a copy-delete of the program itself. Once the license is transferred, the original program is inactivated and a new one can be activated (sort of delete-copy, more in line if you think about it with what happens to a physical good). However, this is all theoretical at this point since no such process exists and the UsedSoft method was considered copying-deleting which Bot said is not protected.

Keep in mind that this particular decision is not legally binding, just an idea of where the court is heading. Also my interpretation can be totally flawed. We need SimonG or crjgreen. :)