The European Court of Justice recently ruled that gamers have a right to re-sell their used digital games stating, “an author of software cannot oppose the resale of his ‘used’ licences allowing the use of his programs downloaded from the internet“.
This basically means that it’s illegal for game companies to prohibit the re-sale of their digital games to other gamers. Meaning it you want to sell your used MMORPG account to someone, it is now legal in Europe and the company can no longer ban you for doing it.
This has even greater implications for services like Steam, who’s entire library of games can fall under this new law. Although in the case of Steam, the law does not state the company has to go out of their way to create a service to allow gamers the ability to re-sell their games.
This is good or bad news depending where you fall on the selling MMO accounts controversy. I sold my D2 account about 10 years ago, so I’m for it as I never agreed with the companies who said they own my account, I always found it to be an overreach of their power. Hopefully we’ll see something similar happen in the US within the next few years.
Source :
http://www.lo-ping.org/2012/07/03/eu-court-ruling-allows-for-re-sale-of-used-games-by-end-users-you/