Digital Game Ownership and First-Sale Doctrine, Explained

You can sell a used book, lend a paperback to a friend, or trade in a physical game disc at a used game store, all without the original publisher's permission or a cut of the sale — a legal right that goes back long before digital distribution existed. You can't do any of that with a game in your Steam library. The reason isn't a vague policy choice by Valve; it's a real, actively litigated legal doctrine, and a five-year French court case that concluded in 2024 shows exactly how deliberately the digital version of that right has been kept from applying to games specifically, even in the part of the world that's actually been friendliest to digital resale rights generally.

The Doctrine Behind Why Used Books and Discs Are Legal

The first-sale doctrine, codified in U.S. law at 17 U.S.C. § 109, establishes that once a copyright owner sells a particular physical copy of their work, their distribution right over that specific copy is "exhausted" — the new owner can resell, lend, or give away that copy freely, without the original copyright holder's permission and without owing them anything further. It's the entire legal basis for used bookstores, video rental stores, and secondhand game shops, and it's been settled law for a physical copy for over a century.

Why the US Ruled Digital Resale Doesn't Get the Same Right

The clearest test of whether this same principle extends to purely digital files came in Capitol Records v. ReDigi, a case over a platform that let users resell purchased digital music files using "forward-and-delete" software specifically designed to erase the seller's copy the moment a buyer's copy was created. Both the district court (2013) and the Second Circuit Court of Appeals (2018, on appeal) ruled against ReDigi, and the specific legal reasoning is worth understanding because it explains why this problem is genuinely different from the physical case, not just an arbitrary line-drawing exercise. The courts focused on the word "particular" in the first-sale statute's text: a first sale applies to reselling the same physical copy the original owner had. A digital file transfer, by its technical nature, doesn't move an existing copy from one hard drive to another — it creates an entirely new copy at the destination, which is, under copyright law, a reproduction requiring its own separate authorization, regardless of whether the original copy gets deleted immediately afterward. That distinction — moving an object versus reproducing one, even instantaneously and even with the original destroyed in the same transaction — is the entire legal reason U.S. courts have found no first-sale protection for reselling digital files, games included.

The EU's More Promising Starting Point: UsedSoft v. Oracle

The European Union's highest court took a meaningfully different approach a year before ReDigi's initial ruling. In UsedSoft v. Oracle (2012), the Court of Justice of the European Union held that a software copyright holder's exclusive distribution right is exhausted upon the first sale of a program or its license — explicitly stating this applies whether the software was originally distributed on physical media or by download, and that a licensee can validly transfer their rights to the software regardless of contract language attempting to forbid it. This was a genuinely significant divergence from the American approach: rather than getting hung up on the physical-copy-versus-reproduction distinction that sank ReDigi in the US, the CJEU treated a downloaded software license as functionally equivalent to a sold physical copy for exhaustion purposes. For a few years, this looked like it might open a real path toward legal resale of digital software, and by extension possibly digital games, within the EU.

Why Video Games Specifically Got Carved Out Anyway

That's exactly the question the French consumer group UFC-Que Choisir tested directly against Valve, in a lawsuit challenging Steam's contractual ban on reselling purchased games as a violation of the UsedSoft exhaustion principle. The case ran for the better part of a decade with results that flipped at every stage: the Paris Court of First Instance ruled for UFC-Que Choisir in 2019, extending UsedSoft's logic to Steam games and finding the resale ban unlawful. The Paris Court of Appeal reversed that decision in 2022, drawing a specific distinction between generic business software (Oracle's licenses, the actual subject of UsedSoft) and video games, which the appellate court characterized as complex multimedia and audiovisual works rather than purely functional software, placing them outside UsedSoft's specific holding. On October 23, 2024, the French Supreme Court upheld the Court of Appeal's reversal, closing out the five-year dispute and confirming, at the highest level of French courts, that consumers cannot resell digital copies of video games purchased online — even under the EU's own more resale-friendly precedent.

What the Combined Result Actually Means

Line up the two continents' outcomes and the practical result, as of 2024, ends up remarkably similar despite starting from very different legal reasoning: neither major jurisdiction currently recognizes a right to resell a purchased digital game, full stop. The US got there by finding that a digital file transfer isn't a first sale within the meaning of the statute's specific text. The EU got there despite already having a precedent explicitly supporting resale of downloaded software, by finding that video games are legally distinct enough from that precedent's underlying subject matter that it doesn't extend to them. This is worth knowing not as a piece of trivia but as a real answer to a common assumption — that stronger EU consumer protection generally would obviously extend to a right to resell a Steam library, given how much friendlier EU law has been to digital consumers on other fronts. It doesn't, and the reason it doesn't was contested specifically and directly, all the way to a country's highest court, rather than simply never being tested.