kitler53 said:
Adinnieken said:
kitler53 said:
i dunno about outright illegal but with their very pro-consumer court system i'll bet if a class action lawsuit were to come from the used game policy MS will lose. their policy of restricting who you can sell to and taking a percentage of your resell value is clearly anti-consumer. i don't think consumers could win in the US but i think they could in europe.
i'm thinking no legal issue with kinect could win in the courts unless MS is proved to be doing weird things with the data collected. |
I don't believe it would. DRM is not controlled by any EU directive (law). Instead, it's controlled by International Treaty. The 1996 World Intellectual Property Organization treaty required those who signed onto the treaty to implement legal protections for technological prevention measures (DRM). In fact, the EU directive is more restrictive than the Digital Millennium Copyright Act in the US.
In the US, a licensee (consumer) may circumvent DRM through their own ability, however no device can be marketed for sale to do so. In the EU, a licensee does not retain the right to circumvent DRM through any means. So, yes. You have the right to make a copy of the disc, but your ownership of the content is limited to the restrictions of the license for use.
EDIT:
To further explain this within the context of the July 2012 ruling, which permitted second-hand digital sales, companies may employ measures to render software unusable when the license is transfered. Microsoft is not permitted in restricting a second-hand sale, but it doesn't restrict Microsoft from defining the means of implimenting a second-hand sale. The point being made here is Microsoft has to provide the means to transfer the license. If the means to transfer a license is through a specific third-party or group of third-parties, or even Microsoft itself, there is nothing limiting that. How you do it isn't define, just that you must be able to do it.
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this isn't all about DRM though. like i said in my last post the real grounds here (for the consumer) is the % of your resell value MS/publishers are taking. the property is yours once it is sold to you and you shouldn't owe MS/EA a half-penny of money for the right to resell what you rightfully purchased.
the restriction in whom you can resell to is a different issue. depends on how it plays out but it could interfere with free markets. in otherwords if MS only approves gamestop to be the used game vendor for the US the anti-monopoly laws will kick in as well.
as of know i can't see kinect being an issue mostly because while people don't like their personal data being sold there isn't really any laws against it yet. i know there have been talks about writing such laws in the US but so far they haven't gone anywhere. so technically MS could sell everything they collect from your (save your credit card number) and face no reprocussion other than bad PR. ..as far as i know.
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It isn't a monopoly, it may be a trust or collusion, but I'm not even 100% sure of that. First of all, in the US there are no rights regarding the first sale doctrine within the digital sphere. That exists only in the EU. There are no laws in the EU regarding the regulation of second-hand digital sales. There is a ruling, a ruling is not law.
So, as long as Microsoft satisfies the ruling they're not going to violate any law. Likewise, as long as they aren't dictating to a retailer how much to pay per license to the consumer, then they're not in violoation of any trust or monopoly laws. The reason is, Microsoft is still in control of the process that allows a digital sale. Nothing says Microsoft can't charge a fee to transfer a license digitally from one consumer to the next, which the retailer has chosen to facilitate. That isn't to say that other laws couldn't be enacted or won't, but right now there are no laws that dictate what must happen. The only thing that exists is that Microsoft must allow it and because of the way they do DRM must provide the means to do it.
