While it would certainly be interesting, this may not be for the best. I could imagine pirates enjoying the heck out of this since all Steam copies aren't exactly hardware.

Well the fist thing that would happen is every game from a major publisher would no longer be available on steam. People often forget this part and think steam has some inherent "right" to sell games; they don't. They need to make deals with publishers and as soon as they need to deal with selling used games, they would pull out. So for us gamers, we would get to go back to paying full price for everything at brick and mortar. No more steam sales. What a fantastic victory!

The other thing people are completely missing is that this is ONLY about the RIGHT to sell games. This is not about steam being forced to FACILITATE the sale of used games. To spend time and money to set up a way of transferring licenses is the best case they could be forced to do (we'll get into the legal problem with that in a second) and even that is a stretch ... the idea that this would include searchable indexes or promotion of used games in steam itself is just crazy. The court can't force steam to open a used game shop, only to change the TOS to allow games to be sold.

The legal problem is that first sale first sale doctrine doesn't apply; you never bought anything. You licensed the use of something. You have no legal right to re-license the use of that something in the US or UK (I'm not familiar with laws in other regions). And even if they forced steam to change the license to allow transfer, these are PC games not consul. The games EULA can simply be modified to prevent re-sale and require an active connection to play (most EULAs already include this, and the only thing preventing more persistent online connections requirements is, ironically ... steam). Any legal challenge to steam is also complicated by the fact nothing in the TOS explicitly prevents the sale of an account, only the sale of licenses attached to it. Steam could successfully argue that you can already sell your steam games by selling the account in all but the most hostel courts.

In other words, the "best case" for people who want to see steam forced to allow the sale of used games is a change to the TOS that says you can re-sell games IF THE PUBLISHER ALLOWS IT. And no publisher ever will. They will react by making every single game ever published on steam require a persistent online connection to a 3rd party, publisher owned service to prevent it's re-sales, something they have already won the legal right to do. For example, if you buy the game "Diablo 3" at best buy, you can't resell it. It's attached to your battle net account, which is not transferable. How would making this the norm ever benefit gamers?

Steam would never allow you. That's how they get their suckers. In fact, you don't even own the games you do buy off steam. Read your TOS. How can you sell something you don't own to begin with? You're basically just renting your Steam games and they reserve the right to cancel your account at any time for no reason at all.

No. Just fucking no. I can't see this doing anything but reducing revenue for developers/publishers. We certainly don't want Steam giving them another reason to not give a damn about developing for PC.

I wouldn't mind as long as you sell the games you bought in the original price you bought them for from the Steam sales.

I can see used games on Steam being interpurtated into the Team Fortress 2 trade system xD