Evil EULAs
Not to regurgitate anything from Slashdot, but there is an interesting post there about a guy suing Gateway in small claims court over a defective computer. Gateway responded by saying that the guy gave up his right to sue when the user agreed to the EULA on the computer. The user says he never agreed to the EULA since his monitor was the problem.
So I starting googling and came across Scott Dunn’s story about InfoWorld Ed Foster’s thoughts on EULAs, at WindowsSecrets.com (don’t laugh), about why they are harmful:
- EULAs are anticompetitive - Blizzard won a lawsuit against BnetD who made an open source product that allowed gamers to play the game on their own servers, instead of using Blizzard’s Battle.net service. Even though BnetD didn’t violate any copyright laws, the EULA stated that the reverse engineering the protocol was prohibited.
- EULAs restrict consumer reviews - McAfee VirusScan had a clause where benchmarks could not disclosed to third-parties without the consent of Network Associates. Thankfully, the state of New York fought McAfee in court and won.
- Bad EULAs are anticonsumer - Back in 1995, Gateway (ahem), was sued for selling a computer with parts that were not advertised. An arbitration clause in the EULA required parties to pay a $2000 non-refundable fee just to go to arbitration!
- EULAs legitimize spyware - This is precious: “One egregious example is the case of FriendGreetings.com, which required users to download and install a reader to see its electronic greeting cards. Customers had to consent to two seemingly harmless license agreements, the second of which stated that the company would be using the customer’s Outlook contact list to send encouragements to download the software.”
So what you can you do? One way, Foster advocates, is to use OSS! There are also tools like EULAlyzer, which look for certain keywords and try to alert you of strange requirements. There are sites like fairterms which are trying to educate folks on why proposed legislation like Uniform Computer Information Transactions Act (UCITA) is bad news and will hurt consumers. Of course, try to get in touch with your respective local governments and let them know how you feel.
Why We Must Fight UCITA by Richard Stallman
Click-through EULAs are not legally binding for end-users in most countries…
“instead of paying for Blizzard’s Battle.net service”
The Battle.net is a free service. No Fees at all.
MRiGnS,
Thanks for the clarification. I updated the post to reflect that.
JanC is correct. Click-through EULAs are automatically invalid in many countries. The only place where they really seem to be valid is the US?
The other sort of EULAs are also in some countries often invalid if the EULAs contain even the smallest statements that are clearly in contradiction with the local law. Yes, one mistake and it’s all invalid in some countries. Microsoft has been hit pretty hard with this especially in the northern Europe.