Deveopers talk about used games countermeasure.

[Kenny]

Mistershine said:

Kenny said:

The problem is a little something called the First-sale doctrine, the very short version of which is that once the physical piece of media is sold to a person, the person is free to do with it as they damn well please.  The copyright owner loses all right to change of ownership of that copy of the copyrighted work at sale.

 

 In that case they could stop selling software and just sell the manual and grant the first owner of the manual exclusive use of the included software.

Even better for consumers, then.  In that case, the companies no longer have any claim to damages caused by copyright infringement, because the copyrighted work was technically given away for free (i.e there would be no monetary value to the lost sales).