Why used software is legal. The legal reasoning.

Anyone who buys a vinyl record may resell it, give it away or lend it without asking the composer's permission. The same is true of a book, a painting, a DVD. The reason carries an unwieldy name, the principle of exhaustion, and is at heart a simple balancing.

Copyright protects the creative work. Yet with the first lawful sale, the rightholder has received their economic reward. Their distribution right in that particular copy is thereby exhausted. From then on, what happens to the copy is governed by ownership.

For a long time it was contested whether this principle also applies where no physical medium changes hands at all, where software is simply downloaded. Manufacturers argued that a download is not a sale but merely the grant of a right of use that could be tied by contract to the first acquirer.

The Court of Justice of the European Union rejected this construction in 2012 (Case C-128/11). Its reasoning is economic and remarkably clear: whoever provides a program for a one-time fee for unlimited-time use is selling it. On a CD or by download, in law it is the same thing.

What governs is the economic substance of the transaction. The technical packaging recedes behind it. A contract headed 'licence' remains, in substance, a sale, and is treated as one. This view, substance over form, is the true core of the judgment. It is the reason the trade in used software stands on firm ground today.

A sale should let exactly one copy move on. So that it stays at this one, the Court tied resale to clear conditions. Each follows the same logic: out of one copy comes exactly one.

Transfer is permitted in particular where:

• the original licence was granted for unlimited time and for an appropriate fee, a genuine purchase, then, not a rental or a subscription;
• the first acquirer makes their own copy unusable upon reselling, so the number of usable copies stays constant;
• the copy of the program was first placed on the market within the EU/EEA with the rightholder's consent.

These conditions carry the entire trade. Only once they are met is the transfer lawful. This is exactly where our work as a dealer begins: checking whether they are genuinely met for each individual licence.

Switzerland follows its own law and reaches the same result. Art. 12(2) of the Copyright Act (URG) expressly provides, for computer programs, that a lawfully sold program may be resold or used second-hand.

The principle of exhaustion is thus anchored in both legal orders. For you as a buyer in Switzerland this means: you stand on doubled ground, the Swiss and the European.

Precisely because the principle is so clear, it is worth looking at its limits. There it shows whether someone truly commands the subject.

An example. A single licence designed for more users than the first acquirer needs may not be split into parts and sold piecemeal. Where, however, several independent individual licences are acquired together, each remains a copy transferable in its own right. Passing them on individually is permitted. The German Federal Court of Justice expressly confirmed this in 2014 (I ZR 8/13).

The distinction is fine, but it decides lawfulness. It is exactly this distinction that matters when verifying the origin of each licence. It separates a serious dealer from a dubious one.

You need not know any of this by heart to buy with confidence. You only need to know that someone does.

Every licence you receive from Keywi24 comes from a verified European stock. Before sale, we check whether the conditions you have just read are genuinely met. With it you receive a VAT invoice as proof of purchase.

And should an activation falter against expectation, theory gives way, quite unlawyerly, to our support: we replace the key or refund the price. The law gives you the right. We give you the certainty that someone stands behind it.