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The reason an EULA is there is to protect the IP rights of the owner of the IP. These are hard things to protect without IP law.You are confusing a EULA with the copyright license itself. A license like the GPL enumerates conditions under which a piece of copyrighted work may be copied and modified+redistributed. A EULA gives you no distribution/modification rights; rather, it seeks to limit your ability to use the software for which you have (ostensibly) already paid money for.
I don't think you really believe that someone who sells something should be able to dictate the terms under which that something is used by the purchaser, that's why I make this distinction.
You have chosen to work in an industry where the product is infinitely reproducible except for artificial restrictions placed upon it, which are imperfect and which are enforced by imperfect human beings. Deal with it, or start manufacturing truck tires or something. Don't try to control me after I have bought your software.
I get paid to develop software. Every time you pirate that software, it hurts me, or people like me.Wrong. Every time someone takes an illegal copy of software instead of making a purchase, it represents a loss of opportunity for people like you. It is not like "taking money out of your pockets", which implies you had the money in the first place. In addition, how do you know it hurts you? Maybe the nasty pirate who bootlegs a copy of your software when they couldn't afford the price was doing a mass evaluation of software for a purchasing contract. Or maybe they are a student who will bring their knowledge of your software with them when they land a career with a design firm, and ask the firm to standardize on your software.
Bottom line is, you can generalize all you want about how pirates are bad and serve nothing but to ruin software businesses, but most software companies are doing fine in spite of rampant piracy, and may in fact be benefitting from it in these rough times where everyone is more watchful of where their dollars are being spent.
If you want to remove one more excuse for piracy, tell your retailers to accept opened returns of software. Nothing burns me more than buying a broken product and not being able to return it because I broke the seal.
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