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"Hive Home" lock their hardware devices to specific accounts. If you move into a house with Hive products already connected to a previous user:

you’ll need to buy a new Hive Hub. source

And what they don't say is: you have to throw away the old one. 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.

Is it legal for a company to restrict people from re-selling (second hand) items - they call this "transferring ownership"? 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.

Ben Butterworth
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This is not 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.

It is not illegal to make a resale effectively impossible, but you can not ban it under the First Sale Doctrine and [Patent] Exhaustion Doctrine.

Accounts are in this case not sold items 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.

Trish
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