I think a lot of people here don't understand the law very well. Just because Apple says something is the case doesn't make it the case.
No, but an EULA is an agreement. It's an agreement between the user and manufacturer. That has legal implications as well. An EULA isn't just there for fun and games. You read the EULA and click "agree", you've entered into a contractual relationship with Apple. You break the contract, and Apple has rights to exercise available legal remedies.
Otherwise they could just write whatever the hell they wanted on that little print and people would be bound to, say, give their first child to Apple.
Now you're taking it to extremes with poor analogies. There's a a set of reasonable limits that Apple adheres to and that other manufacturers adhere to.
Why can't they write that? Not (just) because people wouldn't buy the software, but because you can't put that sort of thing in a contract -- can't in the sense that, a lawsuit would contest it and a judge would strike it down. What if Apple put it in right now; there would certainly be a period before a lawsuit -- does Apple own your first child during that period? Of course not: until it has been actually tested in court, a contract with novel characteristics exists in a bit of a legal limbo, not really validated as law. That is how EULA's currently exist in the US. But they have been tested in Europe -- and mostly found wanting. Thus the question of presumption -- what do you presume to be the case prior to the contract being tested in court -- is arguably that those EULA "contracts" are invalid until proven (in court) otherwise. At the very least, simply citing Apple's EULA claims in no way proves that those claims are legal.
Except that legal remedies are open to them in order to enforce the EULA.
To summarize: EULA is not yet law!
No, but it is enforceable under the law, with legal remedies being available to the manufacturer. You can certainly test an EULA for reasonable standards of expectation, but keep in mind that most EULAs meet such standards. Until that standard is tested you're in breach.
Not only is buying and installing your OS in a hackintosh not theft, not piracy, and harmless (except to Apple's business interests), it's not even a misdemeanor crime. So far, legally, it's nothing.
No, it's not nothing. You seem to think an EULA is meaningless. It isn't. It's an agreement, the breach of which makes certain remedies available to the manufacturer. They're not just empty words on a page that have nothing behind them.
Even if it were found to be illegal, my personal belief in private property trumps my allegiance to Apple's business interests
So if it is illegal you'd still do whatever you wanted because you feel you're right? Disturbing.
(Incidentally, there is a bit of nuance to this: Apple's claims would be much stronger if, like corporations do with Sun or MS, you explicitly signed a contract to license software. That's fairly kosher. So it's not that software can't be licensed per se. Rather, it's the "EU" part of EULA that's at issue -- that consumers are bound by whatever the corporation puts into the fine print merely by having bought the software. That's the part that's iffy and was struck down in Europe. And reasonably so: by that logic, everything we buy could have EULA's attached to it, specifying whatever, say, Target wanted about when and where we could wear their clothes. Perhaps that would be defensible if it was just Target -- but imagine if all clothing manufacturers did it. Agree to their contracts, or go naked... EULA's are very bad ideas.)
No one, that is, NO ONE selling computers or software in the current market is interested in seeing a legal precedent set that blows a hole in the principle of the EULA. Crazy.
