It is not illegal to use a cd-remover as long as you own the actual game
There's the problem. You don't actually
own the game, you only have a license to run it. The reason this is, because if you owned the game itself, you could do anything you wanted with it, included decompiling it, messing around with the insides, then selling it as your own. You don't own the game and you don't own the code. You only have a license to run it, and to only run one copy of it at any given time.
Under several new laws passed through by Congress, the most troublesome being the Digital Millenium Copyright Act (DMCA), you cannot reverse engineer that program, don't own it, cannot run it in ways unintended by the publisher and for the most part, can't even sue the creator if there's something wrong with it.
It goes against the licensing agreement you have with Epic to run Unreal Tournament in a way other than originally intended. By using a no-cd crack, or any other method of defeating their copy protection scheme, you have broken a law or two, as well as losing the rights to play the game under that contract. Pretty scary, mostly unenforced by game companies, widely ignored by the public, but it's hard law.
An example of this same situation, except with actual legal action being taken, is the case of DeCSS. For those of you that don't know, DVDs are in an encrypted format which allows only DVD-players (hardware and software) who have made contracts to be able to play/decrypt the video. What happened, is a Sweedish teenager and others reverse engineered the rather laughable encryption scheme and created a beta for a open-source software DVD player. They have been sued, are in court, and websites that published the DeCSS code have been court-ordered to take down the code. The arguement is that the MPAA has the right to decree how you play your DVDs. You may own the physical DVD, but it is not legal to play it however you want.
Another example is the very operating system most of us use, Windows. Have you ever actually read through the entire EULA (End User Licensing Agreement)? It basically states that you do not own your copy of MS Windows, you are renting use of it on one machine. You can't even sell your copy to another person, as the EULA is non-transferable (MS has gone after people on EBay for this). The agreement is also able to be terminated at any time by Microsoft for any reason. They don't like you, they can legally say to you that it is now forbidden to use it.
Again, scary stuff this is. The worst part is how little the public knows about the legal issues of the software they're using.
