Ooh, I don't think so.

The "general terms of business" are defined in law as a statutory contract. Ergo, even underage individuals can enter into a contract of simple trade.

If such terms were to be imposed as "general terms of business", some sort of contract would be signed at the time of purchase. Yet purchasing software involves nothing more than the default statutory contract of trade.

The nonsense found in EULAs has no such government endorsement. What's more, entering into a contract requires some sort of knowledge of the contract. You can't tell me that downloading something from a website has made me a party to a contract, because having no idea of this, it's impossible for me to be a party to it.

After all: without altering the program (which is not allowed without a license)

Says who? If I own a copyrighted work, I'm entitled to do what I like with it, save for copying it. That includes modifying it. There is no difference here from me buying a book and scribbling all over it.

Depending on the software, you can also just extract the files without running the installer. Additionally, proving that you "agreed" to the licence needn't be nearly as simple; the user that uses the software isn't necessarily the person that installed it. I also have difficulty believing that EULAs are valid instruments; in disproving the false statements that only the EULA grants you permission to use the software, the EULA becomes extremely one-sided. EULAs that attempt to redefine the nature of a transaction that has already occured, from a sale to a grant of a licence, are particularly entertaining.

Simply put, a license is an agreement giving you the right to use the software.

This is simply false. If I make a piece of software, and distribute it for free online, I don't have to grant the users permission for their use of the software to be lawful. Copyright grants monopoly rights solely over the creation of copies; however, copies of computer programmes created that are technically necessary to the use of software in conjunction with a machine are permitted by law under USC 17-117.

A successful demonstration of this is the GPL:

You are not required to accept this License in order to receive or run a copy of the Program.

Of course, the software is still covered by copyright and it's license, so you're really selling the license.

False. A second hand sale involves the sale of physical property. There is no exception for software. A "license" can refer to many things; in the context of software it tends to refer to a fictional concept created by the software industry, the implication being that one is required, typically per user, or even per feature. However, a second-hand copy of a piece of software is a lawfully produced copy of a copyrighted work, and so no license is required merely to transfer ownership, nor is a "license" legally required to use a piece of software.

USC 17-117 creates an exemption for copyright with regards to copies of computer programmes technically necessary to their use in conjunction with a machine. Thus, copies of a computer programme made on a hard drive or in RAM are not infringing.

The lack of necessity of a "license" is demonstrated in the GPL. The GPL explicitly states "You are not required to accept this License in order to receive or run a copy of the Program.".

"People in space has been and always will be a dumb idea." You say that now, but when good ol' Sol ages to a red giant you'll be singing a different tune!

The OpenSSL library provides a varied array of cryptographic services, not just an SSL implementation. Just because something uses OpenSSL doesn't mean it's SSL-based. I suggest you grep the SSH RFCs for 'SSL' and 'TLS'; you won't find anything of note.

I dug up some numbers years back - I should get more up to date ones, but at the time, computer & videogames were around a 10 billion dollar a year industry. Movies were too if you just counted box office, and didn't add in video rentals and sales, licensed toys and merchandise, etc. Radio, magazines, and books each weighed in at around 20 billion a year. Television was 40 billion a year. At the same time, telephone service was a $172 billion a year industry. Is all of that for entertainment purposes? Of course not. Many calls are for business purposes, medical emergencies, etc. etc. But estimate what percentage of phone calls you think are leisure related & multiply it by that 172 billion - unless you guess pretty low, it's still the world's number one entertainment medium. Games like WOW may not be the most ideal place for it to "fit in" in some ways. That just says to me that games where voice chat fits in perfectly with what people are wanting to do will, someday, possibly be much bigger than WOW. With seven million players, about 1 in 1000 humans on the earth plays WOW. How many of the earth's humans like "talking to other people" as one of their very most favorite things to do? Regarding the 11 year old group leader, by the way - this is part of the "future shock" inherent in moving from the physical labor era, where small kids couldn't do work with economic value as effectively as full-grown adults, to the intellectual labor era, where sometimes they can. This suggests that some of them would/should/could be taken more seriously, given more freedom or authority, etc. But of course we're not used to that, and social change takes a while to catch up with new underlying realities. America is still gradually adjusting its culture about sex decades after we invented birth control pills and blood tests for all known STDs.