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As others have already tried to explain, I can sign a contract with ten billion million signatures, but if that contract violates some basic rights I have as a human, that contract will not stand the test of any judge in the western world.

True. At least, a contract is not legaly binding if you agree to your rights (i.e. as described in law) being violated. However, I doubt whether the OS X EULA (and Vista's for that matter) contains much that would 'violate some basic right'.

There are known cases of EULAs that stated things like "the user is not allowed to publicise negative information about this product".

Irrelevant, as, as far as I know, the OS X EULA does not contain such a statement, and even if it would, that's not what prevents you from using the software on a different machine.

By telling me I cannot install my copy of Leopard on a non-Apple computer, the EULA violates basic property rights;

It'd be a very ammusing excersize seeing you trying to defend that in a court of law. You may claim it's a type of tie-in sale ("koppelverkoop" in Dutch law) and you may feel disgruntled about it, but Apple really doesn't take any property from you (that's what property rights are about) when they prevent you from using a product on a machine of your choice.

Signing any contract that violates this right, whether you knew about it or not, will mean nothing;

I'm pretty sure that a contract that transfers the ownership of something you have to someone else is perfectly legal binding. It is called "sale". You must have some really strange notion of "property rights".

I don't think there will be any judge in the western world that will not smash the Apple EULA to smithereens.

Perhaps not, but that's because there'll be no actual court case. Remember that Microsoft's Vista license has similar provisions like preventing you from running Vista in a virtual machine. I'm pretty sure these are reasonably sound licence agreements, and I'm also pretty sure we won't see many court cases about them.

Contrary to popular belief, you actually DO own software.

Now really? Good think you know this for sure, as I always thought the software is licensed to you instead of sold to you. Come to think of it, I'm pretty sure the only thing you actually own is the DVD, the case etc. Come on Thom, present hard evidence instead of blurbing about.

You paid for it, just like you paid for a DVD or a CD.

I paid to go see a movie in a theatre? Do I now own the theatre? Or the movie? I paid to rent a car. Do I now own the car?

The same copyright laws apply, and the same property rights apply.

You also do not own the contents of a CD or DVD. They are not licensed to you as software is, but there's very strict regulations about their use.

A contract that violates basic rights you have as a human will BY DEFINITION be void. EDIT: Assuming you install it on just one computer, of course.

1) The OS X EULA does not violate any basic right, as far as you have demonstrated.
2) If I install it on two computers, it's OK for my basic rights to be violated???


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