Slashdot Mirror
NY AG Sues Network Associates Over License Terms
An Anonymous Coward writes: "Excite is running an article about how New York is suing McAfee over what it considers a restriction of free speech because McAfee does not allow customers from publishing reviews without prior approval from McAfee. From the article: 'In one instance, Network Associates demanded a retraction of an unfavorable review published in the online and print magazine Network World, citing a clause on its Web site that prohibits product reviews without permission, the lawsuit alleged.'"
This is a statement found in many products, most notably oracle. You can't publish Oracle benchmarks without Oracle's permission. Hopefully these rules will be rendered moot by this case.
In .au, the goverment regulates Lease Agreements for housing, home building contracts, home buying contacts, finance contracts all to protect the consumer and give them a minumum set of rights.
Why don't the goverment do the same thing with software EULAs?
The point that EULA or click-trhough license on their website is a binding contract does not seem valid. If this contract infringes on one of the basic rights it should not be legal, same as I can not legally sell myself into slavery by signing any contracts. ;-)
(most probably not, because in the absence of explicitly stated agreement the copyright holder by default reserves ALL rigts and you can do nothing at all with that piece of software, not even run it :-( ).
Another interesting question is if just that part of the contract is found invalid in court, does the contract have the provision for invalidating clauses one by one or does the whole contract become invalid?
And if the whole EULA becomes invalid, can one legally violate their license and dissiminate ("pirate") their software as much as he wants?
Okay, so I buy my software, I say okay to the EULA, I start using the product, realize that it blows and stop using it. Now, the EULA agreement is an agreement I agree to in order to use the software. If I decided to stop using that software, is that EULA still binding? If it is still binding, for how long?
Free Mac Mini
EULA: ...by purchasing this vehicle, you agree to never criticize our product openly...
Implication: no safety reviews. So if I go out to buy a car, I can't find out how dangerous it might be because the EULA has prevented constructive criticism from being presented to the public. Let me see, this would be bad.
The solution is, of course, not to buy from such a company. Unfortunately, most people don't begin to read EULA's; they're like the fine print at the bottom of car commercials - almost no one ever reads them, nor do I think many humans have the physical ability to read small dark print on dark surfaces in small amounts of time.
This also sort of reminds me of the Dilbert commic where by opening his software, he becoms Bill Gates' towel boy... and the house comes for him. He'd get his lawyer to help, but the lawyer opened the EULA first.
My take: if the contract signee doesn't understand the implications of the contract, they shouldn't be held liable. That would have to be determined in court, but boy would that be good news for Native Americans; if it could be retroative, think of all the land they could win back.
Enough mindless babling.
F-bacher
James Tiberius Kirk: "Spock, the women on your planet are logical. No other planet in the galaxy can make that claim."
There are three things that protect slashdot from this. They have signed no agrement and they are either a common carrier or a news paper.
The first problem is easiest to see, Slashdot does not use and will always be able to avoid $oftware that comes with a license that is not the GPL. No use, no problem no matter how stupid contract law may become.
The other protections are a little less obvious, but a freshman level journalism class and the API stylebook helps to understand the purpose and function of liability laws. Slashdot is mostly a common carrier and can not be blamed for the comunications they facilitate. The phone company is not responsible for crank calls. If you count deleting machine generated posts and blocking other denial of services "editorial control" then Slashdot may be a newspaper. A company that wishes to sue Slashdot for slander must prove that damage intent and malice, and even then the truth is the ultimate shield. One of the goals of free speech is to protect the public by alowing people to reveal damaging truths. Now if Slashdot were to tell a lie, and knew it was a lie, and knew it would cause someone distress, Slashdot would have done something wrong and deserves to be spanked. Proving all of those things is next to impossible.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
I vote to interview a lawyer for the next Q&A. Frankly between these EULA arguments and the BSA stuff in the last article I'm frankly VERY confused :(.