Did you know that when you buy The Sims, you're not buying a video game at all? To buy the game itself outright would mean that you own the game and can do anything you want with it. Electronic Arts, the company that makes The Sims, does not want you to have the ability to do whatever you wish with the product you bought.

What you have purchased is a license to the product. This means that you, the undersigned, agree to use the product only in the manner specified in the license agreement. The End-User License Agreement (EULA) for Windows XP Home Edition is ten pages long (some of which is in French) -- single-spaced. Here are some of the things Microsoft will graciously allow you to do with the software just legally purchased:

You may install, use, access, display and run one copy of the Software on a single computer, such as a workstation, terminal or other device ("Workstation Computer").

You may permit a maximum of five (5) computers or other electronic devices (each a "Device") to connect to the Workstation Computer to utilize one or more of the following services of the Software: File Services, Print Services, Internet Information Services, and remote access (including connection sharing and telephony services).

You may also store or install a copy of the Software on a storage device, such as a network server, used only to install or run the Software on your other Workstation Computers over an internal network; however, you must acquire and dedicate an additional license for each separate Workstation Computer on or from which the Software is installed, used, accessed, displayed or run.

Aw, thanks, Bill Gates. Now here's a list of things you may not do:

You may not reverse engineer, decompile, or disassemble the Software, except and only to the extent that such activity is expressly permitted by applicable law notwithstanding this limitation.

You may not rent, lease, lend or provide commercial hosting services with the Software.

Software identified as "Not For Resale" or "NFR," may not be sold or otherwise transferred for value, or used for any purpose other than demonstration, test or evaluation.

Unlike a refrigerator, which you may disassemble and re-sell to your neighbor, Windows XP is non-disassemblable and non-transferrable. Unless, of course, your jurisdiction has a law expressly allowing you to decompile software, which it probably doesn't.

Two examples

The software world, perhaps more than any other world, is filled with copyright law, intellectual property law, and contract law. Bitter disputes are fought over who owns what and how much. Take two examples of intellectual property law and software gone horribly wrong.

Software patents are, ostensibly, used to assure that the maker of software gets compensation for his work. Otherwise, what is the incentive to make software at all? If he isn't going to get paid for it, then his opportunity cost is infinite and he'd be better off digging graves. We should compensate the makers of software so that they keeping making software.

Patents, though, have long lives, lives which sometimes outlast their creators. Patents also become commodities which have value and can be bought and sold. A patent entitles its holder to royalties whenever anyone wants to use that patent. This is called a "license."

In 1970, AT&T invented the Unix opreating system, and since that time, it has become the bar-none standard for high-impact computing. In the early 1990s, Linus Torvalds and others developed the Linux kernel, which may or may not have been based on Unix code. Over the years, the patent for Unix had been sold to a company called SCO. SCO makes all of its money by licensing Unix and suing companies that don't purchase licenses for Unix. SCO spent the last several years suing companies which used Linux without a license from it. SCO claimed that, since Linux was a derivative work of Unix (something never definitively proven), it was entitled to license Linux.

Fortunately, the business powerhouse IBM was one of the companies sued. IBM has more money than SCO could ever dream of, which means that it would see the suit to the bitter end. Most of the time, large patent-acquisition corporations sue smaller entities, banking on the fact that the smaller entity will run out of money and settle out of court. This reduces the entire debate to the question of not who is right, but who has more money.

The second case of IP gone wrong comes from Marvel. It's a great comic book company, but it's gone off the deep end this time.

City of Heroes is a massively multiplayer online role-playing game (MMORPG) that allows players to create their own superhero characters. Apparently, a lot of uncreative people made superheroes that were very similar to Marvel superheroes. Marvel sued NCSoft Corporation and Cryptic Studios, the owners of City of Heroes, for "vicarious" copyright infringment by designing software that makes it easy to infringe upon the rights Marvel holds to its characters.

What's next? Every time Little Timmy wants to dress up like Superman, he has to pay DC Comics a $15 licensing fee? Well, not quite. Fred von Lohmann of the Electronic Frontier Foundation says that Marvel's legal claims are shaky:

From a trademark point of view, it is difficult to see how these kinds of noncommercial activities could satisfy the "use in commerce" threshold imposed by federal trademark law. Copyright lawyers will reason that these activities, even if technically infringing, are almost certainly sheltered by defenses like fair use or de minimis non curat lex. Marvel, for its part, will doubtless say that its legal beef is with the operators of "City of Heroes," not the players (pay no attention to that pesky complaint, that's just legal mumbo jumbo).

As von Lohmann goes on to say, Marvel's attempt to extort its fans "is both unprecedented and unnecessary." If Marvel wins, then "[t]hose who want to appropriate characters and objects from their favorite movies, comics, games or television shows will be limited to virtual worlds either operated or licensed by the corporations that own those cultural objects." Marvel has created cultural icons and now it demands that every instance of those icons being used be regulated. Either you go through Marvel, or you think of something yourself. And if that thing you think of is too close to something Marvel already has, then you're done for.

Again, the point of a trademark, like a patent, is to give an incentive to Marvel to keep producing cultural content. Game players are not selling stories containg Marvel characters, nor are they insisting that they own the rights to these characters. They're just using the characters for their own personal entertainment -- well within the purview of "fair use."