Humble Bundle - "All keys are for your personal use only."

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.

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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I know, I'm a monster devoid of feelings.

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. I’m basically renting the service to the product, instead of actually owning anything.

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.

"All keys are for your personal use only." - bla bla bla
make 1 key then, lol
soooo simple

Don't care.

Thanks for the warning, that said, It makes me feel like getting some spare bundles and gifting them somehow...

I suspect that they don't actually mind, but that the legal provisions have to be put into place to place in order to protect the copyright status of the material.

Here we go again :D

Just drop it people.

The fact that they include this in the TOS doesn't mean it goes against the law. For instance, we are supposed to be able to sell these kind of things and it doesn't actually matters what they say.

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.

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.

Personal use includes gifting, at least in Sweden. So for me, it's totally okay, really, because I do follow the rules when I'm gifting HiB-games.

What do you say?

Btw when they say it is for Personal use, this only means that it is not for Commerical use. So, you can't buy 1,000 keys and sell them after the bundle has ended for a higher price. Giving them for free is not commercial usage.

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.

giving away a key is a personal use imo