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Originally Posted by Shaggy
Sigh. Only because in this specific case, there is no ownership. You are trying to draw too much of a generalization from this.
Section 117 lays out limitations on the rights that a copyright holder can claim in a EULA, but in order to qualify for 117 the user must own the software.
The only way an EULA trumps 117, is if the user is licensing the software and doesn't own it.
In the Blizzard case, the judge ruled that the EULA holds because they were licensing the software and 117 doesn't apply. You're making a logic error if you think that means that software is never owned with a EULA present. That same district court has ruled in the past that very thing, and ruled in favor of ownership despite EULAs.
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The judge's actual ruling says this:
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the state law at issue here neither conflicts with the interoperability exception under 17 U.S.C. § 1201(f) nor restricts rights given under federal law. Appellants contractually accepted restrictions on their ability to reverse engineer by their agreement to the terms of the TOU and EULA.
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Note also that it describes the software at issue as
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Battle.net is a free service that allows owners of Blizzard games to play each other on their personal computers via the Internet
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Ownership wasn't the issue in this decision it's the violation of the agreement without regard to "ownership" concerns.