this post was submitted on 21 Jun 2025
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Not true. With older physical games which fit on the CDs/DVDs you by law owned your copy and had full ownership over it to do whatever you wanted.
That's the difference between license and owning.
No, when you own a game, you can make copies and sell them. That is because owning the game means you own the copyright to the game.
If you are not the owner of the IP (which you aren’t, unless you own the company that made the game), then the only way to legally play the game is for the actual owner to provide you with some kind of license. If you don’t have a license then the default copyright rules apply which means you aren’t legally allowed to have or play a copy.
Your license is also limited and doesn’t allow you to ‘do whatever you want’. Try selling copies and see how quickly you get sued. You can’t even do what you want with your single copy. Go buy a bunch of physical games and start a game rental business. Or buy a bunch of physical games and open a game cafe where people can play ‘your’ games. Your license doesn’t allow you to do that.
There are limitations of what you can do with your copy that you own, but the laws that apply to them are different than those of digital games. By design all the protections physical goods had were removed for digital goods by the same companies. That's why ownership is dead.
By law I can trade or sell my copy of a physical game to anyone I want because I own it. Read https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First-sale_doctrine.
First sale doctrine gives you some rights, but it doesn’t give the all same rights you would have for any other physical object that doesn’t include copyrighted work.
If I buy 100 chairs, I’m free to start a chair rental business. If I buy 100 copies of a game, I cannot start renting them out without permission from the actual owner of the game.
The fact that the law entitles you to a slightly broader license doesn’t take away from the fact that it’s still just a license and not ownership. The only thing you own is the physical media (e.g. the plastic disc) not the contents of that disc.