I appreciate what you are saying and I am not disappointed.

Accepting terms of an EULA are down to the individual and may or may not be legally standing.

I will stick with Gog as a store for now.

Ha, that's for certain! I'm sticking with GOG myself and I hope they grow, prosper, and get more and more games!

Since none of Gog's staff has chimed in they probably don't know either.

Until they get this sorted out, don't die.

Been used many times in movies and tv shows and it never tricked me:)

just transfer your username and password. done, without anyones knowing or approval

you keep saying the law says so, but not actually provided any evidence of it so far. Alaric.us have provided a ruling saying this is not the case, so the burden of evidence is now on you. Quoting said law would help, and clear up this mess.

The worst that could happen is that they dig you up from your grave and put you to jail.

you might be dead but your inheritor could end up in jail
or in the least the account could be deleted (as i heard is current steam policy if you notify them someone died)

The vast majority of licenses aren't transferrable, and I suspect that GOG's EULA reads the same way. So, technically, I suppose you couldn't.


Realistically... who gives a fuck? Do what you want. I suppose if you took it to a court, you could argue that you own the games and aren't bound by the license because of the language used on the website like "you buy it, you own it," that suggests that you're acquiring ownership in the game rather than a mere license.

But what do I know? I'm just a lawyer.

that's why i said that legislation is years behind the current technologies. except in criminal cases lawmakers don't know or even care enough about digital technologies/IT. And sometimes even in criminal cases.

Will all digital goods in the end be just a license?
will that be reflected in lover prices somewhere down the road?
will the lawmakers protect the customers?
will the customers care enough to make the courts protect them?

could GOG even make all their games inheritable if they decided to do so? or would they need to negotiate that with each publisher seperatly?

GOG would have to negotiate their agreements with their publishers, depending on what quantum of ownership they purport to distribute. But yeah, a terminable license is almost unquestionably not something that could be inherited.

You're right that the law has to catch up as far as digital goods are concerned, because there's still no real consensus on what one's ownership of digital goods actually entails. Generally speaking, US courts have been more pro-corporation than pro-consumer with these sorts of issues, which wouldn't bode well for this.

what i find interesting is reverse situation, where sites and services (like facebook, google, microsoft...) use their users data raging from internet habits to personal data and photos, ant the climate seems to be if you have put it online its free for all, whether it is companies them selves collecting the data and selling them to third parties, to distancing themselves from possible theft
versus their copyright and licenses which they protect mercileslly

will that double standard be able to survive legislation finally catching up to 21 century or will the corporations be forced to give one thing or another


again that also depends on consumers being informed and caring about the issues enough for the legislative to even bother about it

Never admit death. That's what my father always used to say (he is dead BTW).

Anyway, I think the reason these stores don't have an "inheritance policy" is because it would open up a whole new can of worms. If you can pass your service (account) to your heirs, people will also start demanding you should be able to pass the account to your friend, or sell it to someone else etc.

After all, all these cases are quite similar, they are all about just passing the ownership of the service/account to someone else, for whatever reason (death, money, death and money, sex, death and money and sex...).

Important distinction: are you talking about inheriting the licenses to the games, OR inheriting the service agreement with GOG or Steam or whatever?

Software licenses can be usually transferred I think (also sold, so why not also inherited?), but service agreements normally can't. The software license agreement is basically between you and the game publisher/IP rights holder (GOG is just the store passing the license to you), while the service agreement is between you and the store/service provider (GOG, or Steam).

So it may well be that it is quite legal to pass all your GOG game installers to your heir(s), but not your GOG (or Steam) account. So they can freely install and play the GOG games you have downloaded from your GOG account (this works in practise because GOG games are DRM-free; the email purchase receipts or credit card transaction logs probably work as a proof of the ownership of the software license), but they don't necessarily have a right to access your GOG account and the services that GOG provides through it (like redownloading the games).

That's how I've understood it in general.