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Originally Posted by DawnFalcon
To be clear: If you run WoW, even so far as the login screen (after the agreements), and do something to break the EULA/ToS (like reverse engineering) then by the court's ruling you're guilty of a copyright infringement - no subscription to WoW required.
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If you run WoW, you're in a contractual agreement with WoW's host company. Your use of the software may be licensed, rather than purchased. Your use of your disc was a purchase; you can copy it onto your home computer, make a backup, sell the CD, and so on. However, connecting to *their* servers with the software may involve a license arrangement, and any use of the software that involves a connection to their servers is separate from your rights as the owner of the disc.
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You're talking about pre-sale licensing, namely shrinkwrap. That's an entirely different issue.
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There is no such thing as post-sale licensing. There are pre-sale agreements, which have had erratic support in the courts, and continued licensing agreements, and other contracts. If you are a licensed user, rather than buyer/owner of a piece of software, you can be guilty of copyright infringement for copying it in a way the actual owner doesn't permit. A fair-use right to format shift doesn't apply because first-sale rights haven't kicked in.
Amazon's EULA can't prevent used Kindles from being sold with the books already on them, because those books were sold, not licensed; it doesn't matter what Amazon says about them, because the terms of money-exchanged-for-book-access matches the description of a sale, not a license.
In the WoW case, the description of the transaction was a license, not a sale. In license situations, the EULA can forbid fair use; in a sale, it can't.