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geoschmo said:
Interestingly Narf and Aiken you are both disagreeing with me, but you seem to be making arguments that are exactly opposite of one another. 
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Well, my point was theoretical, while Narf's one was practical. And from the point of view of classic economics, various EULAs are just contracts of general tenancy. But their prevalence doesn't mean it's the best way of "selling" software. For consumer of course. Software companies are pretty happy with their licenses.
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Aiken, you seem to be taking the opposite side of the argument. Going so far as to call it a "commodity" and saying you have the right to do with it whatever you want, even destroying it. This is true of the CD the software comes on of course, but is it true of the software on the CD? DO you have the right to copy it and then destoy the original?
It's not a commodity really is it? If you destroy a shirt you bought you can't use the backup copy of the shirt. In that case you aren't really buying the shirt as much as you are buying the labor, materials and skills neccesary to make the shirt for you. If you destroy the shirt and make your own, you aren't doing anything wrong. But that will take time and effort on yoru part.
But if you copy software, you aren't doing the same thing as making your own software. There is no labor, no skill invested on your part. You are pressing a button and making a copy. So it's clearly not the same thing as every other product and commodity you might purchase.
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It's all about our _technical_ inability to reproduce material goods quickly and precisely. It doesn't change the commodity nature of software. Take a book, and make a copy of this book with a copying equipment. Your work is incomparably easier than process of writing this book by author, but you have a copy of this book and it's legal (not sure about US, though
). Also, the process of copying with a computer can involve writing thousands lines of code, and heavy programming wizardry. Does it mean that this method is more legal than click-n-drool actions?
Also I can never buy an actual information, I can buy a copy of this information tightly associated with material carrier (cd, tape, or computer system itself). And this total of carrier and copy of an information is what I call "commodity". So if I make a backup copy of cd, it will be a copy of a copy of sofware/information. So where's the original? The original is shared amongst the brains of creators of this information, computer storages, paper notes etc. It's virtual and it doesn't exist in a single tangible form.