The relevant section is blunt. “The Software is licensed to you, not sold,” the EULA states. “You are granted a limited, non-exclusive, non-transferable, and personal license to play or use the Software for your private, non-commercial use on the system or device it was intended for.”
The terms also restrict renting, modifying, or obtaining games through unauthorised means. Nothing in there is new, technically. Sony’s EULA has always said this. The timing is what makes it land differently right now.
Old school was “shrinkwrap eula”.
When you took the literal shrinkwrap off the box, you agreed.
Then it switched to “use eula” and the box that pops up containing the EULA that says “click to accept” and there’s no other option but to accept…
That’s the point you agree.
I don’t think it’s ever been “at purchase” at least in America. Because obviously gifts are a thing and purchasers aren’t always users and more importantly users aren’t all purchasers
A cracked game might circumvent those popups and/or screens, but I honestly don’t know why they would put the effort in or if it would matter. And if it mattered probably varies a lot by country.
EU is very adamant that you can only present contractual terms before entering an agreement (purchase) not after. All those EULAs showing up in the game before you are shown the main menu are void in EU.
If the EULA is instead embedded in the purchase flow with an “I agree” checkbox then the UsedSoft vs. Oracle case is likely still precedence to argue that you own the copy. Reason is that the purchase flow uses the “Buy” terminology and nowhere outside of the EULA it mentions rental/lease/limited/etc. This would breach the “reasonable consumer expectations” as the storefront didn’t make it clear in their purchase experience that it was only a limited license you obtained and that a normal consumer doesn’t expect “limited” when reading “Buy”. This part has though not been tested in court yet but most legal scholars agree that this would be the likely outcome should someone bring it up.
The logic was:
If I took home a $200 box of software in 1995, installed it, and then drove back to Circuit City in the morning and returned it, there was no way for anyone to tell.
Like, across all aspects of American media, profits skyrocketed with CDs because consumers couldn’t easily copy them. With cassettes and floppy discs, piracy was just accepted. And when they got to start over with CDs/DVDs they wanted to do everything possible to break the piracy habit in the window they could.
American Neoliberalism kicked off with Clinton in 1992, which is when all this was happening and corporate profits were prioritized over all else in the pursuit of campaign donations.
Like, this shit didn’t happen accidentally, we didn’t just stumble into it.
There’s reasons for why our shit is so fucked and it’s not in the EU.