Blog post by Stephen Wyber
The European Citizens’ Initiative (ECI) on the right to resell digital games is on the agenda of a joint hearing by the European Parliament’s Internal Market and Consumer Protection (IMCO), Legal Affairs (JURI), and Petitions (PETI) Committee on 16 April.
The ECI addresses a practice that many consumers know well: buying a game on the understanding that they own it, only to find it switched off or deleted by the company that sold it. Knowledge Rights 21 (KR21) supports the push for action, and we have a direct interest in its outcome, because the problem the ECI identifies is not specific to games.
Libraries Face the Same Structural Imbalance
Libraries and the researchers, educators, learners, and citizens who depend on them operate under conditions that are structurally identical to those the ECI describes. Licensed digital collections disappear without warning. Access is conditional, temporary, and governed by contract terms that no individual or business would be expected to accept.
Our Insights paper on unfair contract terms documents the range of practices libraries routinely encounter: refusals to license at all; withdrawal of content with little or no notice, sometimes mid-term; price differentials running from 300% to over 1000% compared to consumer rates; and provisions that remove rights granted to libraries by other bodies of law, including copyright law itself.
Moreover, unlike individual consumers, libraries are not natural persons, and therefore have limited scope to rely on statutory remedies such as unfair contract legislation that is available to consumers, despite the fact that libraries exist precisely to serve those consumers. Freedom of contract assumes both parties are equally strong. This is rarely the case when libraries have an obligation to provide access to content, as well as pressure from users, and they rarely have the same access to lawyers and professional negotiators that publishers do. The result is a structural imbalance that the shift to digital has made significantly worse.
Shared Problems, Shared Solutions
The ECI is coming to the Parliament at a time when there is already growing concern about ‘ens**ttification, the process by which digital platforms progressively degrade the service offered to users once dependency has been established. The Norwegian Consumer Council’s recent open letter to European authorities underscores the need for stronger action to protect consumers’ interests and experiences in a digital world, with a focus on the upcoming EU Digital Fairness Act. The ECI, in effect, is a further call for action. So too is KR21’s focus, as part of our Library Action Plan, on closing the protection gap that leaves libraries exposed to the same dynamics.
This gap in European Union legislation could be remedied by the Digital Fairness Act, an amendment to the Consumer Contracts Directive, or as part of legislative initiatives around education and research, such as the upcoming European Research Area (ERA) Act.
Libraries are not a niche case. Europe’s over 100,000 libraries serve researchers, students, clinicians, and citizens who cannot purchase all the content they need. The policy objectives that those institutions serve, open access to research, educational equity, and cultural memory, are the same objectives that EU digital policy claims to support.
A Digital Fairness Act that addresses the imbalance between game publishers and gamers, but leaves libraries exposed to the same structural unfairness, would be a missed opportunity, leaving library users unprotected.
In their work on the upcoming Digital Fairness Act, the IMCO and JURI committees have the opportunity to ensure the Act’s scope is broad enough to match the scale of the problem.
16 April 2026
