The troubling part is, that they are making blanket statements about all reverse engineering of abandon-ware regardless of original EULA or even if there is a party left to injure. We're straying dangerously close to "bank robbers use cars so cars should be illegal" territory.
Imagine buying a home, and then on move-in day you find another contract taped to the front door that asks you to sign it in exchange for keys. In such a situation, the obvious thing to do is to just ignore the exploitation and call a locksmith. It's your house, after all; you have a prior negotiated sale that says so.
EULAs work if you had to agree to them in advance of the product sale, of course. If you buy something from an online service, chances are you agreed to its EULA before being allowed to buy it. In fact, for "app stores" in particular (iTunes, Steam, etc.) individual products sold therein could have a post-install license with implicitly-fully-enforcable terms requiring no additional agreement, because the terms you agreed to when registering for the store could obligate you to abide by any additional terms shipped with the individual products.
Right to Return: If you do not agree to the terms of this License, and if you purchased this game from a physical retail store in the United States, and if you have not installed or used the Software, you may return the Software for a refund or exchange within thirty (30) days from the date of purchase by following the instructions for return available at warrantyinfo.ea.com.
(emphasis added)
There are lots of things which aren't contracts which have legal force, so this is a huge non-sequitur: you can't leap from "EULAs aren't contracts" to "doesn't have any legal force." Maybe the most charitable way to read you then is saying that it's an "unenforceable contract". But courts are often willing to enforce such contracts, so that's not really true either. Courts have given various reasons why they've enforced EULAs, but I sense that the deepest reason is as a form of syntactic sugar: there is a "right way" to formally do this sort of thing, but that "right way" is much more inconvenient than this way, so this way is allowed too. Yes, technically the store that you bought Adobe Photoshop from should have had a printed contract which they presented to you when you bought the software, much like the many papers you'll have to sign when you're buying a car -- but because you're not buying from Adobe but from a third-party reseller in a vast network, a click-through license makes a lot of economic sense in a way that the "now let's negotiate for the keys to this house!" after-the-fact contract doesn't.
To make the Australia comparison more interesting, can I ask if there are consumer law rights that make anti-jailbreaking and copyright terms in game EULAs unenforceable there?
Actually, you generally can do the latter, unless the law specifically makes the right not waivable. Contracts, in general, are about giving up rights guaranteed by law.
Back in the 90s, there was a Microsoft printed EULA that said that breaking the shrinkwrap counted as agreeing to the EULA, but you couldn't access the EULA without breaking the shrinkwrap (and opening the box). :)
Contracts are VERY powerful in this country. The old saying that you can't sign your rights away is totally wrong. The default is that you can sign whatever rights you have away unless it is forbidden under the law.
