Under US law, EULAs are binding per Vernor v. Autodesk. This does not apply to the EU which may forbid certain restrictions in EULAs.
Generally US law gives primacy to contractual agreements, and the EULA is a contract in which you give up some of your rights in exchange for not being sued for copyright infringement for copying the software from disk into RAM. This is copying under copyright law and the 1976 Copyright Act does not protect copies made for personal use.
Note that this does not apply to open source software; OSS licenses are bare licenses under common law and do not have the force of contract.
Proprietary software without an EULA cannot legally be used except by the copyright owner. That's why EULAs exist.
>the EULA is a contract in which you give up some of your rights in exchange for not being sued for copyright infringement for copying the software from disk into RAM. This is copying under copyright law and the 1976 Copyright Act.
That sounds ludicrous, I can't believe it. Is there a precedent of this argument being used in court that you know of?
IIRC it has come up in various Blizzard lawsuits around bots and cheat software.
From MDY Industries v. Blizzard:
> As with most software, the client software of WoW is copied during the program's operation from the computer's hard drive to the computer's random access memory (RAM). Citing the prior Ninth Circuit case of MAI Systems Corp. v. Peak Computer, Inc., 991 F.2d 511, 518-19 (9th Cir. 1993), the district court held that RAM copying constituted "copying" under 17 U.S.C. § 106.[4]
That one is more about another program accessing the ram and reading it (the act itself meaning that data in memory is "copied" again) but it's not a big jump to apply the same logic to a regular player's usage of the game.
You have done so if the painting is under the copyright of someone else, surely?
I’m afraid the argument that copyright is infringed when a copy is made within computer memory has long standing in the courts & is well established at this point in time (to my lay legal understanding).
Generally US law gives primacy to contractual agreements, and the EULA is a contract in which you give up some of your rights in exchange for not being sued for copyright infringement for copying the software from disk into RAM. This is copying under copyright law and the 1976 Copyright Act does not protect copies made for personal use.
Note that this does not apply to open source software; OSS licenses are bare licenses under common law and do not have the force of contract.
Proprietary software without an EULA cannot legally be used except by the copyright owner. That's why EULAs exist.