So far as EULA and exchange money at a store goes; I've posted it before, I'll post it again.  Your transaction at the store is between you and the resaler, not between you and the publisher.  You have agreed to precisely nothing by exchanging money with a third party who has no intrest in the development of the product itself, your agreement with the publisher is inside.

While most stores won't honor it, the EULA advises you, in most cases, to take the product back to the place of purchase for a full refund if you disagree with the license.  You can, of course, mail it back to the publisher also.

You can argue about the terms, etc. but the issue is end-users don't understand software very well to begin with, evidenced by things like people not understanding CounterStrike: Source is a modification for Halflife 2 and not a stand alone product, etc.  The publishers are strugling with how to get end-users to understand that having two copies of a program running at the same time is wrong.

The GPL is one of the most opressive licenses.  By giving a friend a copy of any GPL program, you yourself are bound to provide them with source code for 3 years, as many times as they ask, whenever they ask, for not more than the cost of media and a reasonable handling fee.

Moreover, because the person who gave you the original copy is only bound to give you the source for 3 years, you have to make sure to obtain the code from them at the same time you obtain the binaries.

The code must include all machine readable elements used to produce the executable.  Continuing down this path, most Linux distributions are out of compliance with the GPL, because most of them don't provide the exact files (namely config.h) that were used to build the projects in their source distributions.

Continuing, the GPL itself is unenforceable unless you sign all of your rights over to a single entity.  This text comes straight from the Free Software Foundation's website, where they explain why you have to sign over all your copyrights to them to participate in any GNU projects.  The copyright is unenforceable otherwise, because every party that contributed even a single line of code to the project is involved in any violation, you have to be able to identify which developers own the copyright on which code, etc.  

But hardly any projects outside of the FSF do this on their GPL projects.

Again, FSF says the license is unenforceable on their on GNU software if they don't obtain the sign offs.

And this is in addition to it extending copyright over code that comes into contact with it, etc. in ways that are inconvenient to a great many types of projects.

Software patents have no place -- and I'll readily agree with that.  You can't patent a mathmatical equation, and all computer programs are just very large math problems written in a different notation.  They are inherently not patentable.

Copyright offers protection, but copyrighted material has always come with a EULA.

Pick up the book of your choice, find the copyright notice:
(C) Copyright xxxx,xxxx-xxxx.  Name of Author.  ALL RIGHTS RESERVED
Unauthorized duplication, etc. etc. etc. is prohibited.

Yes, it's short and sweet.  And yes, its absolutely necessary to protect their intrests.  Any book publisher could run copies of any book without copyright there, at which point people who are writing books of great social or technical value, or simply of great entertainment value, would be unable to make money.  Publisher B would undercut Publisher A, because they have no investment in the content.

That's what copyright is there for.

The EULA's have been there since day one, also; again, originally they were short and sweet.

What is causing EULA's and DRM to become so important to the industry is the number of users who don't care about violating copyright.

The Computer Games industry tried several times during the 80's and 90's not including opressive copyrights, with the same results each time -- widespread disregard for their investment in creating media and code for the games, and wholesale violation of their license agreements.

This is why Microsoft, Valve and others are moving to concepts where you have an account with them, and download program code and media as needed.  The assumption that they are making is that the use of a central server ensures that you are in compliance with the license.

You can complain about it as much as you want, etc. but the users who were wholesale violating copyright laws are the people who brought the EULA's down on the rest of you.

People buying Halflife Platinum and installing Halflife by itself on one computer, and counterstrike by itself on another, and not noticing the fact that counterstrike does not function without halflife because the installer automatically covered for it.

You want DRM to go away?  You want EULA's to go away?

Quit treating college students as heros for duplicating media illegally.  The RIAA is trying to defend their constitutional and legal right to control a particular recording.

The students are welcome under copyright laws to sing a britney spears or whatever song themselves, to record that song, and to distribute it for free.  They are welcome to perform it themselves.

The issue is the original artist and the agents they have contracted with have a right to the original recording.  The original software developer has a right to the software they developed, etc.

As long as a small percentage of users through ignorance, spite or pure greed continue to try to violate the original author's rights to their original content, you'll have problems.

Also, for the vast majority of users, shrinkwrapped software with major version numbers easily identified is critical.

Alot of Linux/Unix people will sing "oh I love the GPL, software is free, etc."

However, what they forget is most of the population cannot build from source, and most of the population doesn't understand the ramifications of copying a GPLed program to their friend, neighbor, etc.  Heck, most of the Linux community doesn't, based on the wholesale violation of the GPL by major distributions of the OS.

The easiest way to provide support to an army of people with intelligence only slightly higher than a lobotomized chimpanzee is boxed software with known characteristics.  You want the responsible party clearly identified, and you sure as heck don't want any third party modifying it.

If the source code for Internet Explorer were as readily available as the source for FireFox, the spyware vendors, etc. would have a field day.  

And not because the code is any more poorly written -- both IE and Mozilla derive from Mosaic.  The issue is that everyone and their brother would be packaging "IE but better" and it would be impossible to know who was fixing what, and it would be impossible to distribute fixes.

You can see this with the huge number of Gecko based browsers.  FireFox 1.03 is coming out to fix a GIF buffer overrun -- how many other gecko based browsers have the bug?