So, I've just read through the entirety of Humble Bundle's ToS. The ToS clearly differentiates "Service", which is the Humble Bundle service including order and download pages, and "Product", which is the games being sold. Unless I missed something, there is no clause in the ToS WHATSOEVER that denies redistribution of the Product. The closest it comes is in the "Your Information" paragraph, giving the term "personal, non-commercial use". It DOES prohibit secondary access to your unique download page under the "Service" term, as well as prohibiting saving hard copies of the site itself, as defined by "Streaming" in the terms.
The FAQ states, under the header "Can I sell/give away my keys?", "Each purchase is intended for use by one individual. Please read our Terms of Service.". To start, an FAQ is not a legally binding contract as the ToS is disputed to be. You are not bound to any terms in an FAQ unless the ToS explicitly states so. Continuing, the use of the word "intended" rather than something as direct as "strictly" muddies enforcement, as does the point back to the ToS which only strictly disallows commercial use (sale) or secondary access of the download page. Not locking down use terminology leads to my next point.
If you want to go in terms of United States law, there's a little thing called the "first-sale doctrine" within copyright law. Quoted from Wikipedia:
"The first-sale doctrine creates a basic exception to the copyright holder's distribution right. Once the work is lawfully sold or even transferred gratuitously, the copyright owner's interest in the material object in which the copyrighted work is embodied is exhausted. The owner of the material object can then dispose of it as he sees fit. Thus, one who buys a copy of a book is entitled to resell it, rent it, give it away, or destroy it. However, the owner of the copy of the book will not be able to make new copies of the book because the first-sale doctrine does not limit copyright owner's reproduction right."
In terms of Humble Bundle, when you make a purchase, you receive up to 5 different copies of any given Product: Steam, Windows, Linux, Mac, Android. By the first-sale doctrine the different installers and keys would constitute the "material object" and thus you are allowed to give away any of these copies, though in doing so you surrender control and thus protection to make copies for personal use under copyright law, just as if you had sold a book you had bought. One could go so far as to designate the individual installers/keys for a single game as parts of a single whole, and thus transferring one part transfers them all, but that makes them no less transferable. Constantly giving away installers would fall under the copyright clause that defines 10 or more copies as constituting commercial use (even if the copies are not sold), but giving away (or reselling) one copy of an installer or key and ceasing use of that purchase fall under the first-sale doctrine.
By this I conclude the following:
Is gifting Humble Bundle keys in the spirit of the bundle? No.
Is it legal (in some regions) to give away anything purchased from Humble Bundle? Yes.
tl;dr - In the US you can give away or resell anything from Humble Bundle legally one time, then you forfeit your ownership of the purchase.
SIDENOTE EDIT: The above mentioned first-sale clause is one of the things keeping corrupt publishers from shutting down the used game industry. Just food for thought.
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I am downright amazed by the sheer number of people who don't understand the difference between personal use and business use.
Here's the difference: Personal use means you don't make a profit from it or use it for work or business purposes. Business use means it is used to make a profit or used for work. It actually makes more sense when you go into the other side and rules companies have about personal use of work provided equipment and what you can do while on company time. A good example is free virus scan software. Those are free for personal use. You cannot install them on a computer that is used for work. The reasoning here is a bit different, as the companies making those programs do not wish to be responsible if the free version causes an issue with a business and that clause prevents them from being sued if a company ignores that and uses it anyhow.
Another example is internet service. Most of the time the internet service you buy for your home is for consumers and they have a separate type for business. Businesses pay more, but also get guarantees about the service being up and how fast it will be fixed if it doesn't work because the lack of net means a loss of profit for most businesses and the ISP doesn't want to get sued for it. They have a clause in their terms stating that the consumer service is for personal use only and due to that they are not responsible for lost profits if it is used for business purposes.
All HB is saying here is that you cannot profit from these keys or the games themselves. They cannot be sold or traded, but also some people have businesses where they do charge for people to use computers on a LAN to play with friends. They are not saying that you cannot give the keys to someone else as long as no money is being made (trading would be a grey area here, but likely not allowed since you gain something from it). They are not saying that only the person who buys the keys can make use of them. They are only saying that you cannot make a profit from others using them.
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Pretty much this. As I mentioned above, giving away items I legally bought is a personal use of the product.
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yeah, agree. legally gifting is probably personal use since you aren't making a profit or getting anything in return
but the thing in the argument(and the reason for the rule(and the thread)) is it isn't actually set up in a way that allows it to be given away once opened, you can try but you'll always still have the games. you have a steam key not as a 2nd game but as an alternate client for the drm free version and you just use whichever you prefer(thats how its intended to be anyway)
it isn't sold as 2 copies of the 5 games(total 10) its sold as the 5 games with an alternate version to be used by preference(total 5)
and while you could give the steam key you can't remove or transfer access to the drm free version. so you could give away 5 games and still have 5 games. the way it is intended to be viewed by hib it isn't any different than running off 2 copies of drm free to give one away(which is definitely against tos).
you can give an entire intact gift code, you cannot gift a steam key from an opened humble bundle. you can try but the game doesn't go anywhere its more like it just copies which you can't do under first sale(personal use or no doesn't even enter into it) and isn't gifting.
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Like I just stated in my reply, "intended" means squat legally. All that is is a word used to remove Humble Bundle's responsibility for non-intended usage.
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well yeah, but this is the internet, we're not actually arguing about legal consequences or anything important(and if we were hib isn't going to be going after anybody even if it were,they've said as much before even), its just arguing about what it really means and is rather than any real world application.
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And mostly what it means is that people can give away the keys and that is fine. If you personally do not feel it is right, that's fine. But no one making those giveaways for games is wrong for doing so.
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really it doesn't bother me one way or the other(mostly just pick the side that looks fun), just for the sake of arguing on the internet. I think the reason they say its not for sharing is they assume you could share the same games. if they were really worried about it they'd have put it somewhere more solid than hidden in the faq(most people gifting here don't use the drm free and regard the steam keys as extra they probably had no interest in the keys they gift or already have the game so don't touch the drm free either, its just that they could if they wanted to)
but it drifted a bit off topic, so for the op's question: how could sg tell if you did it when all keys look alike? and if you could tell with work why would it be steamgift spending time and mods to enforce somebody else's rules for them? Technically its against sg rules, but theres no way to prove any of the people gifting bundle games actually got them from a bundle so unless you put in the description that its a hib key they just leave it alone. So its more that they do it anyway than that they're allowed to do it.
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To make it clear, I disagree with anyone buying one bundle and playing the DRM-Free copies while giving away the Steam keys. That is abuse in my eyes (same as ripping a movie/CD onto your computer and then giving away the disk).
What I am referring to is giving away Steam keys of games you already own on Steam from previous purchases.
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oh, yeah, not saying specifically that you or anybody else is doing something wrong, just that imo thats probably the reason the faq says not to split them. cause how would hib know you own them? not that hib would go after people anyway...
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I admit, my knowledge of it is a bit more in-depth than most people's because I cross those lines often. One of the joys of working from home, your home becomes your workplace and your stuff becomes for personal and business use.
Yeah, one advantage is that I can write off a percentage of utility costs on my taxes and don't have to commute (a lifesaver because my car won't start right now and I can't afford to fix it). But if I get consumer grade internet, it's at my own risk. If the service has an outage, my ISP is not responsible for my losses to my paycheck because I cannot work without internet. That is because there is a clause in the agreement I signed stating that the service is intended for personal use only. Since my ISP is awesome and rarely has outages, this isn't really a problem and my savings is worth the risk.
The main reason for that sort of a clause is usually to remove responsibility. Obviously HB doesn't wish to be dealing with having to support things not working in the case of something resold. Even the line in the FAQ about them being intended for use only by the person who purchased it isn't binding. "Intended" means squat. That just means they are not responsible for uses outside of the intended use, not that such uses are truly forbidden.
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And like I already stated, that means very little. All it does is remove HB's responsibility for losses or problems encountered due to unintended uses and they do not have to support such uses.
More than likely, they don't want people giving away or sharing accounts to give people the keys or DRM free downloads. That is a support nightmare if it happens because proving who the real owner is can be a pain in the butt.
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From bundle games? Hardly a real issue with the cap imo.
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Eh, I don't think 'contributor status' would count as an income of any kind so that's not really a valid form of "profit".
You are thinking "benefit", or perhaps "status", which is different. Gaining a higher standing/status in a community by donating things you have purchased for actual money is not profiting in any way...
(And please don't bother countering with "but you can win more!" The chances of winning a game with $30 or less contributor value in a public giveaway is usually around 0.1%)
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I know, I'm a monster devoid of feelings.
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The fundamental issue with a lot of DRM (including steam and humble bundle keys/gifts) is that as a consumer I am very limited to what I can do with a digital product.
If I purchase something physical, I can pretty much do what I want with it. I can gift it, I can re-sell it, I can let someone borrow it, etc.
However everything I buy in digital format, even if I pay the same price as a physical retail copy I am very limited to what I can do. Iām basically renting the service to the product, instead of actually owning anything.
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"If I purchase something physical, I can pretty much do what I want with it. I can gift it, I can re-sell it, I can let someone borrow it, etc."
This has not been true for a very, very long time. Most games feature some form of DRM, from the code books of old, requiring the disk in the drive (and protecting it from most ripping programs), CD keys, and more. Don't even get me started on stuff like SecuROM. That applies to console games, maybe, but DRM had been a thing even for physical copies of PC games for some time. In fact these days you're a great deal more likely to find DRM free games digitally than physically; take the Humble Bundle, for instance, which provides DRM-free downloads along with the Steam key.
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Most rules like that also apply to physical content, the only difference is one is harder to enforce than the other. Steam can revoke games at any time, but it's much less likely for someone to barge into yout home and take your game because you lent it to someone else.
Digital is the way forward for large companies because it grants them control over everything they sell a lot easier.
It's not ideal but we consumers do prefer things easy, no matter what negative comes with it.
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I respect this wish of the Humble Bundle and Indie Royale by not giving away these keys and not entering suspected giveaways, but I don't think it's a crime against humanity to give them away. At most it's a minor transgression which will result in no more than a couple of hundred years in Purgatory.
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Thanks for the warning, that said, It makes me feel like getting some spare bundles and gifting them somehow...
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My choosing to give one of my keys to another person IS a personal use and I don't really give a damn what they say to the contrary.
This sort of clause is meant to prevent resale, anyway.
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I'd honestly be interested to know if Humble Bundle has ever complained to SteamGifts about this. After all, when a HB is released, the amount of gifting of the games in question skyrockets so it's not hard to tell what's going on.
If they haven't, it should be pretty safe to assume this is a non-issue, and they're only concerned about reselling keys. Especially since if giving was such a huge problem, separating the keys into individual keys rather than one key for the bundle as a whole remains a strange move.
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cant you tell that knows the law, i mean look at the pic.
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One thing that no one has mentioned here is that Humble is not the creator or IP/rights owner of any of the games in their bundles. Therefore, once you've paid them and the key passes from them to you, they have absolutely no say (legally) on what you do with that key. Only the developers, publishers, or other owners of the intellectual property can make stipulations on the use and distribution of their product. The most Humble could do if they had proof that someone violated their terms of service (a difficult if not impossible task) is refuse to sell to that person in the future... And considering that you need nothing but an email address and a paypal account to buy from them, they couldn't really do that either. The only purpose the Humble ToS serves is to protect them against legal action and it means pretty much zip to bundle buyers.
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So why is everyone allowed to gift these here?
Edit: So I was informed it is NOT allowed. You are allowed to gift the bundle if it's purchased as a gift, but not the individual keys. So do this at your own risk.
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