Like I don’t understand why this even became a thing and who even thought of it?
In: Economics
Start with the basics. At least in the US, the Constitution provided for copyright. By default no one has any control over any work he produces. But this provision allowed the government grant a limited monopoly on the distribution, copying, and performance of an author’s work. You can buy a book. You can resell that book. But you can’t make copies of the book and sell them because the author has the exclusive right to do that. You can’t put on plays based on the book without the author’s permission. Authors have in the past tried to keep people from even reselling the books and software they lawfully bought, but that was stopped with the First Sale Doctrine — the author loses the distribution right for copies he already sold. But he still retains performance and copy rights.
This copyright is colloquially known as “ownership” although it is only a limited government-granted right.
Generally in law, a license is something that allows you to do something you can’t otherwise legally do. So you have a license to drive, to pilot a plane, to practice medicine. This license is the same, and it’s in the form of a contract. In exchange for your money, the author grants you authority to copy that program to your computer and load it into memory. But that’s it. You are not authorized to make more copies and sell them to other people, as that is a right under law the author has still reserved to himself, or his business partners.
Authors can’t put any condition they want into this license though. For example, licenses prohibiting unapproved reviews of the software have been found to be unenforceable. Generally, contracts that are contrary to public policy, illegal, or otherwise considered unconscionable, can’t be enforced. The easiest example is contracting a hit man. That’s illegal, so neither of you can get a court to enforce a violation of the contract’s terms.
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