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Turkish on 27 May 2013
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Mnementh said:
Turkish said:
Mnementh said:
Turkish said:

Its blocking used games and Kinect is mandatory(meaning you cant turn it off), these practices are unlawful and there are laws in place in Europe.

Which laws do you mean? There were lawsuits that decided that it is legal to sell used software. but no lawsuits that forbade making techniques for making reselling software hard or impossible. So I don't see a base, on which XBone is unlawful here.


Seems a recent law

A recent ruling by the Court of Justice of the European Union has officially stated that “an author of software cannot oppose the resale of his ‘used’ licences allowing the use of his programs downloaded from the internet”.  In essence, it is now illegal in Europe for companies to try to stop you from selling your used digitally distributed software.

The exclusive right of distribution of a copy of a computer program covered by such a licence is exhausted on its first sale.

http://www.lo-ping.org/2012/07/03/eu-court-ruling-allows-for-re-sale-of-used-games-by-end-users-you/

I'm fully aware of this ruling. But you get it wrong and this article gets it wrong to some degree.I think to remember that you can read german (sorry if I'm wrong), here a some more details:

http://www.heise.de/newsticker/meldung/EuGH-Klares-Ja-zum-Weiterverkauf-gebrauchter-Software-1631306.html

The point in the lawsuit against usedsoft was - that it was sued for reselling software. It is clearly legal to resell software in the EU. That doesn't mean, that software-devs cannot technically make it hard or impossible to resell software. That's what I wrote. If it was different, the iPhone Appstore would be illegal in Europe. But iPhones are sold here and it is possible to buy apps. I'm sure: a former collegue of me works now for an app-dev and a friend works also in a company that creates phone-apps. They can legally sell it over the appstore.

Even if I cite the article you provided:

“Therefore, even if the licence agreement prohibits a further transfer, the rightholder can no longer oppose the resale of that copy. “

Microsoft doesn't prohibit resales, there is a clearly defined way to resale used games. But if I apply the interpretation, Wii, PS3, Vita and 3DS would be illegal in europe. Because it is not possible to resell  games you bought as digital downloads on these devices. And the ruling of the european court about the company usedsoft was about a case of a resale of downloaded software.

 

What MAY illegal is the fee for MS and the game-dev. That might or might not be in conformance to the rules of the EU. But in the case they are not right, MS only needs to drop the fee, but can keep the registration-process.


If the fee is illegal, then blocking used games wont be such a big problem, you'd just wipe away the game from your account and sell it to someone else without paying anything. Anyways, I think problems await microsoft in europe about this whole mess.