Bowers v. Baystate
A 2003 US case holding that a shrinkwrap licence can forbid reverse engineering that copyright law would otherwise allow.
Harold Bowers sold Designer's Toolkit, an add-on for the CAD program Cadkey, under a boxed licence that prohibited reverse engineering. Baystate Technologies bought a copy, took it apart and shipped a competing product. A jury found Baystate liable for breach of contract, and the Federal Circuit upheld the verdict: a private contract is not preempted by copyright law, even when it forbids something the law itself permits.
Judge Timothy Dyk's dissent has been quoted more often than the majority. A negotiated contract is one thing, he argued, but a licence nobody can negotiate lets every software vendor write fair use out of existence on its own say-so. Together with ProCD v. Zeidenberg, the ruling made the EULA a stronger fence than the statute.