Of course you can't sell your soul in an EULA and there's always this gray area where users might not be held accountable for selling their souls with a single click on "I agree".
But you're saying that copyright law refers to distribution, but well, you can't have that binary distributed legally unless you agreed to that EULA. And if you haven't agreed to that EULA, then by using the app it's copyright infringement.
The other problem is that most users won't be able to crack their own binaries and distributing or even downloading cracked binaries from the Internet will be copyright infringement.
Even so, lets assume that an easy to use tutorial will be provided, such that somehow users aren't violating any laws. Well, this is why the industry is pushing for DRM, which ends up getting used not only for encrypting media, but also for protecting binaries. And in some parts of the world it is already illegal to crack DRM.
And if not, I see the industry winning this argument and pushing for legislation protecting them, because truthfully they can point to people that crack binaries in order to freeload and pirate stuff for free - even if such arguments will be morally and factually wrong, they'll win by those arguments with the right lobbying power being exerted. It has been happening for some time now.
> You have the right to do whatever you want with the bits on your computer
Sure, if you don't like how the Facebook app works, you can choose to not use it.
There's no way you can package this argument as to make it right.
> And if you haven't agreed to that EULA, then by using the app it's copyright infringement.
No, it really isn't.
Breach of the EULA does not automatically translate into breach of terms-of-use for the service and neither of those translate into copyright infringement.
They would have a case to terminate your right to use and maybe they'd sue you for damages if you cause any but copyright has nothing to do with it (in this case, there are edge cases where copyright might be invoked but this is not one of those).
> Sure, if you don't like how the Facebook app works, you can choose to not use it.
Yep.
> There's no way you can package this argument as to make it right.
Well, the company won't like it and may sue you but they will still have to convince a judge that you caused them damage. And suing a private individual for pennies in lost ad sales is just not going to happen.
It wouldn't be. You have the right to do whatever you want with the bits on your computer, you just don't have the right to redistribute all of those bits.
Copyright is about distribution, not about modification (well, it is in part, such a modified work would be classed as a 'derived work' and that is why you can't redistribute it, just like you can't redistribute the original).
> courts starting to rule ad blocking in browsers as being copyright infringement.
That's utterly wrong. Copyright infringement is about distributing content, not about forced consumption of content that was freely given to you by the rights holders or their agents and associates (the ad networks).
And rights holders have plenty of options here:
No court will ever rule this as copyright infringement.