Bundled in with my xbox I just bought were some games (e.g. Halo). Prominent on the disc was the words “not for resale”. Do they mean just retail? I presume I own that disc. Is there really anything stopping me advertising and selling the game say on ebay?
In general, can a seller put a lien on something he sells stopping the resale?
Yes. You may sell it on eBay if you wish. But the retailer may not take it out of the box and sell it separately from the game.
Back when I smoked, I noticed that one local retailer used to pull apart the stuck-together “buy one get one free” packs of cigarettes and sell them separately at full price. One’s not supposed to do that.
I don’t have a full understanding of this, but let me offer some anecdotal experience I had.
I used to work in the garment industry about the time it was going down for the third time (as far as manufacturing in the USA was concerned). I work with a CAD system designed for garment production. When our company sold out, they didn’t have a buyer for that system (hardware & software bundled together). I looked into brokering it myself to another small manufacturer. Tech support was very, very, very neccesary with this system, so I contacted the manufacturer/publisher of the system and inquired about getting tech support for the buyer I wanted to broker it to.
(The point of all this). I was told that software falls into a special category of intellectual property and that the license you recieve when you buy software bears more of a resemblance to a lease than a bill of sale – you aren’t buying the right to re-sell the software. To do so I would have had to pay a fee to the original manufacturer. Friends of mine who worked as programmers told me this was pretty standard. Sooo…maybe the games that came with the xbox fall into this sort of area.
My ancedote happened 1996-97, so the laws concerning these issues may have evolved since then.
I’m not an expert in American copyright law, so I’m just going to contribute a little information without pretending to give a definite answer.
U.S. Copyright law recognizes the so-called ‘first sale doctrine’. Section 109 of Title 17, US Code, states:
The section mentions several exceptions to this principle (among which prohibitions of rental of computer programs), but as far as I know the sale of computer programs is not treated any differently from books. Furthermore, a few years after the DMCA was passed, two government reports treated the first sale doctrine extensively: see reports by the NTIA and the US Copyright office. Both noted general acceptance of the first sale doctrine for all sorts of materials, even for legally made material copies from legally downloaded material. They only drew the line at extension to cases without a material copy.
So, speaking generally, you would not need permission of the copyright owner to sell the legally acquired material copy (disk, CD-ROM) of a computer program.
However, even with this general principle there may be specific prohibitions in specific cases: the sale agreement may have contractual limitations, and the license might not amount to a real license but to a rental agreement instead. But a US copyright lawyer would be able to explain this in more detail.