On this page you can find out more about the legal situation regarding the purchase or the sale of used software. However, if you feel unsure or have any further questions, please do not hesitate to contact us personally or by e-mail! We are looking forward to advising you!

Purchasing and selling used software is legal!

On 3 July 2012, the European Court of Justice judged (judgment in Case C-128/11) that

“An author of software cannot oppose the resale of his ‘used’ licences allowing the use of his programs downloaded from the internet.”
“(…) even if the licence agreement prohibits a further transfer, the rightholder can no longer oppose the resale of that copy.”

This judgment liberalises the market for used licences – also for licences downloaded from the Internet, such as Microsoft volume licences, Adobe licences or other. This was previously only possible for box products, which means software in physical form, such as in the form of a disc, because for these products the “principle of exhaustion” applies. According to this principle, the manufacturer’s right to prohibit a resale expires after the sale.

Until the judgment mentioned above, this principle did not apply to downloaded software. In all European countries, the copyright law is usually several hundreds of years old. Thus, it was not up to date regarding this topic. The European Court of Justice has correctly recognised that the software remains the same, whether as a download or as a physical product in the form of a disc. However, it is important that it is a perpetual, temporally unlimited licence. The judgment of the European Court of Justice legitimised the sale of software licences, which are downloaded from the Internet – and therefore an important gap in the law was filled.