End of hope for players. This Wednesday, October 23, the Court of Cassation ruled in favor of the Steam platform in the conflict that has pitted it against the UFC-Que Choisir association for almost ten years, according to the l’Informé site.
The first had taken Valve, owner of Steam, to court, accusing it of prohibiting players from reselling their downloaded games. Although the Paris High Court ruled in favor of the association in 2019, authorizing the resale of dematerialized video games, this decision was invalidated in 2022 by the Paris Court of Appeal. Sentence that was confirmed by the Court of Cassation.
A question of direction
In its ruling, the Court of Cassation indicates that “the rule of exhaustion of rights” does not apply to dematerialized games. The UFC-Que Choisir was based on this rule, resulting from the 2009 directive on the legal protection of computer programs, according to which a distributor can only control the first sale of a good, a right that is exhausted once its commercialization has ended. . In other words, it authorizes the resale of software.
The Court of Cassation, however, considers that this Directive does not apply in the present case because “a video game is not a computer program in itself, but rather a complex work in the sense that it includes software components in addition to many other items”. like characters or a story.
The Court of Cassation also considers that video games are not covered by this directive, but rather by the 2001 directive on copyright. However, according to the latter, “the question of exhaustion of the right does not arise in the case of services, in particular when it comes to online services.” Almost ten years later, the battle between Steam and UFC-Que Choisir ends with a victory for the former and a defeat for the latter and the players.
Source: BFM TV
