https://wccftech.com/will-the-french-court-ruling-produce-change/

As we previously reported here and here, the French Court has issued a ruling that Valve’s Steam platform must allow the sale of digital games in the used market.  This is great from a French consumer standpoint but hopes for a similar ruling occurring in the United States should be tempered by previous rulings by American courts.  The idea of the right of ownership of digital products and the fight against consumers by copyright holders in regards to digital content is now a very old topic. Over a decade ago Amazon (NASDAQ:AMAZON) reached out from its secret lair and removed Kindle owners copies of George Orwell’s book 1984 in a very Orwellian manner. This was many people’s first encounter with the power of large multimedia companies’ ability to control the content that the consumers thought they had purchased. 

The fight between content creators and consumers is nothing new though with a variety of laws and principles in place that over time have created a clear understanding in the area of material products.  Where these principles have broken down though was in the area of the easy reproducibility of digital content and the lack of clear evidence that a digital product has actually changed hands rather than just been copied.  When the internet first started to take off in the 90’s readers may recall Napster and other file sharing services that people used to copy and pirate music which leads to copyright holders bringing down the hammer when it comes to ownership rights.  This lead to legislation in the form of the DCMA passed in 1998 and the commissioning of a report from the US Copyright Office, a 200+ page report you can fall asleep to while reading in your free time here.