Again, it depends of the country. Usually, you can resell games that came on a physical support, but not those in digital download, because, well, they usually come linked to a service from the digital retailer, and are linked to an account with said retailer. Plus, they dont get "used". But, at least one retailer offer the possibility to trade some games (http://blog.greenmangaming.com/2011/01/green-man-gaming-a-trading-introduction/)
(not sure what to do with dvd version of steamworks or origin games though, since they force you to link it to an online account)

edit: Weird, GG is back in USD for me now, even tough my IP address hasn't change

As the poster above me already mentioned, this unfortunately isn't correct anymore. It depends on where you live.

Here in Germany, the Verbraucherzentrale (our version of a BBB) actually went to court to prevent media publishers from prohibiting customers to resell digital products. They went to Germany's highest court and unfortunately lost. The judges stated that the new business practice was legal as long as no physical product was shipped, and explicitly recommended people to not buy digital-only products if they don't agree with the "no resale / you don't own your purchase" business practice; he apparently expects the market to sort things out. It's unfortunate, one may not agree with it, but it's the law now.

I have no idea where you got this from, it certainly wasn't part of anything I said. What I'm saying is that 1. Gamersgate explicitly sells their games under the provision that they are non-transferable once downloaded, 2. that this is part of the contract one agrees to when buying games from GamersGate, and 3. that giving said games away to someone else violates said contract. This is objectively true and can be checked by anyone who can be bothered to look up the actual facts at the GamersGate site.

I also voiced my concern that violating this agreement hurts GamersGate's business, which in the long run will hurt the paying customers. This is an opinion, but one that's backed by basic economics and that has proven to be true often enough. In no way did I mention "charity" or made the other claims you read into my post.

This part of the discussion started as a question about the long-term availability and safety of products bought at GamersGate. It was not intended to be a discussion about the legality of resales or about economic systems and law. If I see people using this discussion (and the info provided) to propagate violating GamersGate's terms of service and spreading Gamersgate products to people who haven't paid for them, then it will do more harm than good, and I will feel compelled to remove my posts and ask the moderators to remove the others. So please stop. Feel free to write me a PM if you do have a desire to discuss the issue with me.

A guy buys a game, wants to let his little bro use it on his computer, and you guys practically call him a criminal?

I rely on people respecting intellectual property, it's a core aspect of my business, but this is just taking it too far.

@wormholewizards: Let your little brother have a happy christmas. Allowing him access to your computer does not make you a criminal, nor is it something you should feel bad about. You are here, buying games, supporting the cause, and hopefully when your brother is old enough, he will do the same thanks to the taste of awesome old games his big bro gave him for christmas when he was younger...

A guy asks about it instead of just doing it and gets preachy replies. "Someone's wrong on the Internet" syndrome is rampant round these parts.

Brb gotta go ask my 8-yo brother to buy another copy of Freespace, Sacrifice, Descent, Arcanum, Kingpin, MDK, Slipstream 5000, Total Annihilation and Icewind Dale. I don't care if he has a credit card or not, he'd better pay for these games on a separate account because I won't stand for piracy.

PS. I know right? The little punk does play all these games. Proud of him, especially him being a new-gen gamer.

There is a slightly simpler way than copying the files... simply use the task manager (ctrl+alt+del) to end the downloader process while the installer is running. Normally, the downloader carries on running in the background and as soon as the installer is closed it encrypts (rather than deletes) the setup.exe. If you end the downloader process before it can do that then when the installer is closed it doesn't get re-encrypted.
This is quicker too because it doesn't involve the copying of possibly large setup files.

Hahaha, 8 years old playing Kingpin instead of Modern Warfare 3. That's kinda brutal.

Nah he doesn't play singleplayer. We play multiplayer from time to time.

*sigh*

Given the tone of that post, it's probably futile to point out that most of the information you're referring to (that the brother is a kid, that he lives in the same house, that the games were to be installed on the owner's computer) wasn't even available when I wrote the post that now apparently creates so much fun. :( The only information that _was_ available was that games were to be installed on the machine of the owner's brother.

_My_ brother is over 30 and lives more than 500km away. If I install games from my Gamersgate account on his computer for him to play then yes, that would be a violation of he contract under which I bought them. And if he really didn't have the money to buy them for himself, then I'd rather just buy and gift them to him as a present as they are pretty damn cheap to begin with. That was the situation I had in mind when I wrote my posts.

It's pretty sad to see how much my posts (in which I actually helped the guy by giving him exactly the step-by-step answer he wanted) get distorted.