California Court: EULAs are Inapplicable in Some Cases

(outer-limits) writes "In a significant ruling in a California court, a judge has ruled the standard EULA licensing agreement to be invalid. This must be the biggest upset in software licensing ever. No more are we powerless End Users of software, having to agree to every restriction a software company makes (Expect an appeal on this, though)." Note that this is about the resale of bundled software, so it's not like EULAs are dead, but this ruling could have broad effects. Update: 02/12 03:45 GMT by J : Yeah, this is a repeat - sorry.

Comments

wait for the years of appeals on this one...

[reemul]

By deciding that a license wasn't a license, the judge has made an astonishingly large and sweeping precedent, which automatically means that this will be in appeals for many many years. Simply invalidating a license (or any clauses of it) for a software package has huge impacts - f'rinstance, if the precedent holds that a license isn't binding without a more formal agreement than just the "if you click/open the seal/download/&etc. you are bound" bits we're used to seeing, what about the GPL? If a download is equal to sale transaction, then someone could just use whatever bits they liked and forget about making future source free - hey, it's mine, the license isn't worth anything, I can resell/reuse at will.

As much as one would like to see the worst offenders in the idiot EULA game get smacked, I don't think that just deciding that the resale/reuse portions of what had been considered a valid contract are null is automatically a Good Thing. Try to remember that Open Source is protected by a license, too.

-reemul