united-kingdom sale-of-goods
Is it legal for a company to restrict people from re-selling (second hand) their products?
<p>&quot;Hive Home&quot; lock their hardware devices to specific accounts. If you move into a house with Hive products already connected to a previous user:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>you’ll need to <strong>buy</strong> a new Hive Hub. <a href="https://community.hivehome.com/s/article/I-ve-moved-into-a-house-that-has-Hive-products-installed-what-should-I-do" rel="nofollow noreferrer">source</a></p>
</blockquote>
<p>And what they don't say is: you have to <strong>throw away the old one</strong>. The old one is completely useless, and tied to previous person's account. It's like Apple saying once you tie a MacBook to an Apple ID, you can't disconnect it and cannot sell it to anyone.</p>
<p><strong>Is it legal</strong> for a company to restrict people from re-selling (second hand) items - they call this &quot;transferring ownership&quot;? Both their app, and their human customer service representatives have told me I cannot transfer ownership or rename the account - as this is the same as transferring ownership.</p>

<p>This is <strong>not</strong> prohibiting the resale. You can resell your old box, but you can not transfer your account, and since the box can't take a new account, it is not a useful item to anyone but the original account holder.</p>
<p>It is not illegal to make a resale <em>effectively impossible</em>, but you can not ban it under the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First-sale_doctrine" rel="nofollow noreferrer">First Sale Doctrine</a> and <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exhaustion_doctrine_under_U.S._law" rel="nofollow noreferrer">[Patent] Exhaustion Doctrine</a>.</p>
<p>Accounts are in this case not <em>sold items</em> but subscriptions and don't fall under First Sale but instead are running contracts - and can be regulated as the contracting parties put into the contract. This contract can ban the transfer (for money or free) of the contract.</p>
