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Comment by tzs | Hacker News Reader

I think you may be reading too much into all of this.

Oracle sued alleging copyright violation. The ECJ ruled that what UsedSoft was doing was not a copyright violation.

Applying that to Steam, it would imply that if I sold someone my Steam key for a game I had purchased I would not be violating copyright. It does not necessarily imply that Steam has to make or allow the key to work for the buyer. That's out of scope for copyright law.

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The UsedSoft v Oracle case is specifically about and whether or not a licensee can resell the software they have purchased.

"On 3 July 2012, the ECJ handed down its landmark decision in UsedSoft GmbH v Oracle International Corp (C-128/11), ruling that the owner of copyright in software cannot prevent a perpetual licensee who has downloaded the software from the internet from selling his ‘used’ licence. This decision has significant implications for the software and other digital industries." [1]

[1] http://www.linklaters.com/Insights/Publication1403Newsletter...

Yes, the copyright owner cannot prevent the licensee from selling the license, but the copyright owner also does not have any obligation to continue hosting a cloud service, to authenticate the existing license on a different account using their cloud service, or to otherwise assist the licensee in transferring the license.

But they might be under an obligation to not build licensing infrastructure into their software that bound licenses to accounts in the first place, in a way that technically prevented users from transferring them. That could be seen as a form of DRM restricting users from reselling something they're legally able to re-sell, and the courts would Not Like That, for the same reason they don't like things like warranties not transferring on resale.

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