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Posted by: One One Seven
I think it's important to note that the law on these things and various customer rights vary wildly from region to region.
That holds true no matter whether you are talking about UK or United States law.
I don't doubt that you have an excellent understanding of US law Foman, but there are an extremely large amount of differences between the two. I would not be arrogant enough as to suggest that I know about customer rights in the US ... though from what I can tell, these rights are a lot less than around the rest of the world (a quick example would be the right to return goods after purchasing them online within 7 days if unopened, or a mandatory 1 year warranty, in the UK).
Yes if Microsoft were to state in their contract that the contract is an agreement to sell the stock at a certain time, like buying a house, then the stock could not be legally sold. If you were to sell your house to me, I cannot sell it on until the process has been completed. I also know quite a bit about the retail business myself, and suggest that such a contract - like a housing purchase - is extremely unlikely, and that a clause stating that the item is not for sale before a certain date is most likely.
So as long as the stock is owned by the retailer at the time of sale, even if the terms of the contract prohibit sale, the retailer can sell the item to the customer, and legally transfer ownership. A customer's Statutory rights in the UK mean that the item could not be taken back as long as ownership transfer was legal, no matter what contractual agreements the retailer broke.
fallenrat has just given you a quote from Australian law, again proving that the rules vary wildly.
Please do not make the mistake of assuming that US customs and law practices are similar around the world. In Canada there might be similarities, but in the UK, we customers enjoy an awful lot of consumer protection!
Yes, as I noted in my opinion, you are right and that would be the case in either the United States or the UK.
There are indeed many statutory differences between US, UK, and Australia, but the common law of all three countries derives from the same source, that being the British common law developed in Great Britain from about 1500 AD through about 1800. Basic property law in all three places, which derives almost entirely from common law, and disregarding statutory changes, remains virtually the same.
As a result, I noted previously that you are making the assumption that title has passed from Microsoft to the retailer and that the retailer has "bought" the game from Microsoft under the condition that it will not resell the game until September 25. But considering that we don't know the terms of the contracts between Microsoft and video game retailers, we cannot say for sure whether a consumer who pays a retailer and receives the game early actually owns the game or not. And that remains true no matter what country you're in. If you pay attention to the details of this legal minutiae, you'll realize that BB's analogy of a person who buys stolen jewels not having legal title to those jewels is not so far off the mark.
At any rate, my point is that you are both right, but you are making opposite assumptions a bit earlier in the chain-of-title that are causing you to think that you're disagreeing -- when you're actually not :-)