Matthew Garrett

Without the law against copying copyrighted works they would never stick or hold up in any court.

Yes, copyright laws would forbid this, except...

To Run a program you need to copy it into memory, which arguably requires a licence.

...copyright law (in the U.S. and probably other jurisdictions) explicitly allows the owner of a copy of a copyrighted program to run it. Such running of a program, even though it involves copying the program into memory, is not an infringement of copyright and does not require any authorization by the copyright holder. This is the way things have been since 1980, when Congress passed the Computer Software Copyright Act with the recommendations of the National Commission on New Technological Uses of Copyrighted Works (CONTU).

Any license granted by an End User Contract is not one necessitated by copyright law. Rather, the contract itself makes it unlawful to run a program without authorization.