Disclaimer: I am not a lawyer. I would appreciate any corrections from lawyers, as finding case law in this area is difficult, especially in Canada.
Software licensing isn't a big-name political issue, but I think that consumers suffer from a lack of a well-defined legal framework regarding software licenses.
Software licenses are contracts that are probably legally much in the same vein as ticket waivers - they're nonnegotiable contracts that sometimes stipulate very unreasonable and not-legally-enforceable terms and are required to use a good or service (see
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ticket_cases for an unfortunately short explanation). Common to both of them is clauses that just fall short of signing away your firstborn child - I believe I once visited a ski resort that claimed that if I skied on their hill, I was giving up my right to sue any of their employees ever for any reason whatsoever.
The trick with software licenses is that they often rely on your inability to legally copy the software in question to your computer without infringing copyright. Without that, there is no consideration for the contract (most if not all of these agreements are agreed to post-purchase). There is very little regulation or case precedent over licenses, and yet they underpin the software industry.
With that in mind, it's important to consider what our stance on software licenses should be. If C-32 gets an exception added to the TPM section making circumvention legal for private copying, it could render many software licenses useless (note: it probably wouldn't affect previous agreements, only new ones) in the narrow sense of the private copying exception. This only serves to add to the mess that is software licensing.
I personally believe that a separate section of (copyright) law should deal specifically with what is now software licensing to remove this madness. The actual licensing would ideally be removed and replaced with statutory rights. The general point of software licensing is a 1-purchase 1-use-at-a-time rule; you can't buy a single copy and run 300 computers with it simultaneously. Beyond that, things can get absurd pretty quickly, such as with clauses that limit how many connections can be made to a piece of software (an actual clause in some Windows license agreements).
The rules on software distributed through Valve's Steam system is an excellent example of what I personally think that software licensing rules should strive for: if you buy one copy, you may use it whenever you want, however you want, and you can copy it however you want, but you can't run it in two different places at once. This is what the physical world gives you. If you get a car, you're free to do what you want, but if you want to drive two cars at once, you need to buy another one.
