I've made some homework (
) and discovered a few things:
In UK, you DO have a consumers association focused on defending consumers' rights. It's called National Consumers Association. I'd humbly suggest asking their help, since in my experience they have the perfect knowledge to fight against teh Evil Corporations
Seriously though, it's thanks to that kind of associations that I discovered how to be refunded of the copy of Windows that comes pre-installed in a new PC.
There is actually nothing that separates the act of selling a product from the act of selling a service, even in UK: if someone sells you a videogame (or any other licensed software), he just needs to give you a copy of the licence agreement with it, and that is, normally, already covered because the licence agreement is written inside every User Guide / User Handbook inside the DVD case. So, I'd really like to know what differentiates, in UK, the "sell" from the "licensing", and in what way are reseller violating that, because I wasn't able to find it.
All the news I read do NOT report of Silver Memberships banned: all the news I could find report that people could not access their Gold Memberships from a banned console, yet using another console they found their Gold accounts perfectly working.
If there are less-known news, I'd like to see them, 'cause I haven't found any...
Finally, I'm pretty sure that the million of banned consoles weren't all bought in the UK
so those who do not live in UK and have different (and/or more favorable laws) would have already started a legal action if they were entitled to it. I bring Italy as a case: our national consumers rights associations (we have at least five, that I know of) have quite some power when it comes to defending consumers' rights. Yet I haven't found any report of a banned Italian player who took action... and yes, I took the time to ask around in many Xbox-focused italian forums. What I found there is just that those consoles were actually modded, and only a couple of people had bought used consoles thinking that they weren't modded only to discover that they in fact were.
Interestingly, the first thing they told me was that someone has already found a way to get around the ban, and seems easily doable! Not a quick process, but doable.