> Yes, but copying a piece of software from a CD into program memory or onto my own hard-drive for archival purposes has been established as a fair-use exemptio

> Yes, but copying a piece of software from a CD into program memory or onto my own hard-drive for archival purposes has been established as a fair-use exemption. So, if I legally acquire a copy of a program (say, I buy a CD), it can't impose extra restrictions after-the-fact through an EULA that only appears when I run it, and I am well within my rights to use my copy (e.g. by copying it into RAM/CPU icache to run it) even if I don't abide by the EULA, according to European Union jurisprudence. We're talking about the GPLv2 though. It imposes no restrictions that copyright does not impose, so voiding the license is strictly a detriment to the licensee. The people who wrote it were very clever, using the power of copyright that is lobbied-for by the proprietary software industry.