Just about every program on the computer has an EULA.

EULA are used for bans and suing companies that break them.

And consoles don't have their games exploited anywhere near as much.

Agreement to the EULA, at least as far as I know, tends to be agreed upon once you open the packaging, be it console or PC. It’s only a nice little CYA for companies. Blame lawsuit happy people…..

I don't want to start yet another argument, so I'll try to keep it neutral. I appologize in advance for rambling, I should have gone to bed hours ago.

Copyright law give generous protections for the "owner of a copy" in terms of software. The main part is pretty basic - you can run the program. Technically, loading a program from your hard drive to RAM qualifies as copyright infringement without that part.

Other parts are more questionable. Copyright law gives you the right to make a back up copy - a right specifically denied you for other classes of copyrightable material (at least the non-electronic ones). It also gives a basically unlimited right to reverse engineer the software "for compatability". For obvious reasons, publishers are concerned about potential abuses by consumers. But legally, they can't do anything about it if they own the copy.

Enter the license agreement. By attatching the agreement to the software, they can argue (with varying degrees of success, depending on which court is hearing the case) that you (the consumer) did not actually buy the software, you bought a license to USE the software. The terms of the license indicate that you do not actually "own" the copy, and thus cannot qualify for the protections given in copyright law.

Since the consumer doesn't have the protections of section 117 (the relevant portion of copyright law), the publisher has to specify what the consumer is allowed to do, and what they are not. Yes, you can make copies as necessary to run the program. Yes, you may make a copy as back up. No, you may not reverse engineer in any way. No, you may not resell this license to someone else.

Probably the most objectionable aspect of the EULA is that the publisher can terminate the agreement, generally without notice or even a specific reason. In almost every case, any action the user does in violation of the EULA terminates the agreement, and any use of the software afterward violates the publisher's copyright. The license agreement is the publisher's way of granting you permission to use software you do not legally own, and they retain the right to discontinue that permission at any time.

Take, for example, the Glider program for World of Warcraft. It's a bot program that basically plays the game for you, and is specifically disallowed in the WoW EULA. If users had owner standing under section 117, Blizzard has no legal means of preventing it's use, nor can they prevent anyone from reverse engineering their game (and the security software on their servers) to allow such programs to run. These sorts of system vunerabilities need to be addressed, and cannot be under current copyright law.

Under existing law, a person could theoretically buy an Xbox game and rework the coding until it could work on an PS3. As "owner of a copy" they legally have that right. Of course they can't SELL that, but they could tell others how to do it. Likewise, with section 117 protection, you could remove all copy protection from your games, to help make them compatable for your computer, and the publisher couldn't say anything.

Problem I find with EULA's is that you won't see them UNTIL you actually take the disc home and install the game. It's not printed in the game manual or anything.

Often, a lot of the annoyances you might find with a protection -- such as Securom with its details on limits of installs -- might be listed in there somewhere.

Maybe game companies should post EULA's of a game on their webpage so gamers know what the hell they're getting into before they go out to buy a game?