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EULAs More Difficult to Read than Tax Forms
krugdm writes: "Mark Hochhauser has an article over at CNet where he talks about the readability of the legalese used in EULAs and what motivates people to just 'Click to Accept' without reading a word of the agreement. He actually did a readability study where he determined that most EULAs are more difficult to read than a 1040."
OK, this is going to be said a -lot-, but hasn't this topic popped up before around here? [On another note, does it -really- surprise anyone? After all, there is -far- less motivation for the average software company to make EULAs readable than there is for the IRS to make its tax forms readable]
-={(Astynax)}=-
"Darkness beyond Twilight"
This guy really misses the point. I don't have a problem with this theory if they're writing for other lawyers. But if they're writing for kids online, it makes no sense to have a 3,000-word policy written at a college-reading level.
The reality is, this stuff is written for other lawyers. Why? Because when there is a disagreement, lawyers and judges (higher up lawyers) will be making arguments/decisions pertaining to the confilict.
A EULA that says "Do you promise not to give this game to all your friends?" just won't do.
It's not the lawyers fault as much as it's the fault of, as the interviewer put it, the "litigious culture".
A modern day witchhunt.
Now, if the tax code (the laws themselves) were easier to understand than a standard EULA, then this would be news. :)
Method of processing duck feet
The IRS wants you to understand the 1040 and to fill it out correctly. Most companies don't want or don't expect you to read the EULA, and it'll stay like that as long as we let them get away with writing outrageous EULAs which carry the force of law and require all sorts of insane concessions on the part of the user.
Yes. Anything that says "free," people want. But eventually people will realize there's not really such thing as "free" software. It comes with a price--in this case the annoyance of advertising, or possibly privacy violations.
Emphasis mine ...
What's this guys address so I can send him a distro of Linux?
Karma? Karma? I don't need no stinkin' karma.
Actually, the article says "the Internal Revenue Service's 1040 EZ form was simpler to read"
The 1040 EZ isn't exactly college-level reading material. It's one fscking page for Chrissake!
Anyhoo, back to the article --- I think the key to EULAs is, as Hochhauser said, trust. Of course no one reads those things. You assume that it's something along the lines of, "Don't install on more than one machine at a time. If something goes wrong, don't expect anything from us." and normally that's what you get.
When Kazaa or other companies violate that trust, word gets around and the market enforces it eventually. People here have to realize that however much they obsess over licenses and privacy, most users including sophisticated users think current practices are perfectly adequate.
What I get a kick out of with these Kazaa/Gator stories is how everyone suddenly forgets to pretend they're full-time Linux users... ;-)
What I'm listening to now on Pandora...
...when you create an industry out of nothing, you need to justify its existence, right?
Think of it. Everything around us is an illusion. We don't need EULAs, we don't need tax forms, we don't need so many of the inventions around us, we don't need insurance, we don't even really need currency, if you think about it. When people talk about the costs of such and such, how much does it really cost? How much does it really HAVE to cost?
The world's been spinning for untold millions of years, and it's been doing it thus far without EULAs (et al). If everyone around the world had a collective moment of brain synergy, we could do away with so many things that a small, elite few would like us to think we need because in so needing it we must also need IP laws, lawyers to write them up, politicians to pass them, etc. And in order to keep needing them, we need to make them more complicated, so that as they evolve there is always new stuff to have to learn about them, and more and more reason to justify the expense of these maintainers of unnecessary pyramids.
Think of it this way. Up here in Canada, we cannot simplify our tax laws, despite the fact that nobody sane likes our tax forms. If we simplified them, we would horrendously cripple our tax industry and infrastructure, which bobs along based ENTIRELY UPON the fact that the tax laws are complicated, and as such necessitates the cost of accountants and tax lawyers and politicians etc. We have an entire industry that supports these people, and it would collapse if we had a central computer take care of it all for us, which is entirely within the realm of comprehension. As a result, there's this nebulous morphing tax industry which everyone BELIEVES is necessary. You Americans, with your massively entrenched legal system, are feeling the same phenomenon from a different standpoint.
The world is bloat. Sorry if that sounds a little nihilistic.
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Bleah! Heh heh heh... BLEAH BLEAH!!! Ha ha ha ha...
Funny you would mention this. I brought this issue to the attention of our legal dept and some of our core IT people who contacted Microsoft, and here's the response we got from the evil empire...
"Yes- Windows XP EULA does not prohibit end users from using third-party remote access applications. We are working on evaluating the Product Use rights to determine if further clarification on this issue is necessary on this issue. Our goal is to enable a customer to conduct a single interactive user session at a time from a remote device, whether the customer chooses to use the Microsoft Remote Desktop, Remote Access and NetMeeting technologies or third party remote access software."
A computer once beat me at chess, but it was no match for me at kick boxing -- Emo Phillips
I read this article before. They are comparing EULA's to form 1040-EZ.
For anybody who hasn't done US Taxes before, 1040-EZ is written to be SIMPLE. You have to fill out a different form if you want to do anything other than put in how much you earned and get a number back for how much you owe.
I filled out one of these in elementary school as part of a tax class. No offense, but if they are going to write an article saying that EULA's are hard to understand, then they should have picked a tax form that uses words bigger than 2 syllables.
However, the reason for contracts like this is all the lawsuits over the years that consumers and other people that have brought that set picyune precedents like "they didn't say that the contract was severable, so I assumed that since one part was obviously invalid the whole thing was invalid".
These lawsuits are how we end up with contracts and EULA's like this.
Whether this is the lawyers' fault or the consumers, or the politically motivated consumer protection groups, or the stupid juries that agree with this kind of crap, I couldn't tell you. Probably a bit of each.
The only way to avoid stuff like this is to stop being a litigious society.
Good luck...
People can understand that.
I envision a time where legalisms will be so complicated and pervasive that we will spend half our time working to pay lawyers(1).
I also envision a time where people become so sick of the gross abuse of the legal system that a new standard applies: any law or contract not held to be understandable by the generally educated person will not be enforceable.
Yes, this will have some serious consequences -- many highly abstract and detailed social and economic structures which rely on highly detailed and abstract legalese will no longer work. The good news is that these will be replaced by simpler, less complicated social and economic structures. As as society we will be more efficient because we won't need to keep searching for ever-more-complicated structures to achieve efficiencies to account for the drag of the legal dead weight we carry.
(1) The reason we will only work half the time for lawyers is that the other half of our time will be spent working for health care. The purpose of the lawyers being to get the health care we've worked for to actually mean something.
There are three separate issues in tax forms. One is that most of the public school teachers teaching math don't really understand it, so most Americans are pretty much innumerate. If your mind freezes up every time you see more than three addition or subtraction operations, there isn't much chance of you understanding any tax form no matter how simple.
Second, if you are numerate, the IRS forms are generally as clear as they can make it while following the laws that a bunch of damned lawyers in Congress wrote. But those laws are generally written to obscure the point rather than to clarify it -- your congressman doesn't want to make it too clear that he designed a particular deduction so that only one corporation in the whole US can use it...
Third, there are a lot of people who do understand the intent of the forms and tax laws, but want to know how much cheating they can get away with. The exact limits of things like legitimate business travel expenses are hard to define, but many people are way over any reasonable line. You know -- fly to Hawaii, have a five minute business discussion, stay a week, deduct it all as business expenses. If your question is, can I get busted for that -- I sure hope so!
We went over this last time. If you have a minor do it, then you get busted as if you agreed to the EULA, AND for contributing to a minor's criminal behavior. Double whammy.
The IRS has actually spent time and money trying to make the tax code (which is harder to read than the average EULA) easy to follow with the various forms they've created.
The average software shop doesn't care if their EULA is readable, and increasingly more companies like it that way. Providing a simplified explanation is not trivial, and has various legal landmines to navigate.
So any comparison is not very reasonable - they are intended for completely different purposes, and one will necessarily be more difficult to understand than the other.
-Adam
Take a real-world contract I just signed, for next year's housing at my school. Now, the way it works here is that you go into a room and pick the housing you want, then take a card over to a couple people with computers who will print out a contract for you to sign, and hand you a 6-page booklet of terms and conditions. Now, I happen to have looked through that booklet a while ago, so I knew there was a clause (clause X) I don't like:
So, I asked the guy if I could amend the booklet to strike that clause. Of course, I couldn't. So my only alternative would be to not sign the contract and then try and find an apartment in New York for $700/month.What did I gain from reading the contract? Absolutely nothing, just knowing that I'm screwed. I'm screwed whether I know it or not, so why shouldn't I just save my time and not read the contract? It was a nice day---I'd rather be outside than wading through a 6-page booklet of legal mumbo jumbo that I can't change.
"But the reason that I don't read EULAs (or most other things I sign) is that there's no point in wasting my time. I can't negotiate with the company if there's a term in the EULA I don't like. Either I accept the license, or I don't get the product or service they're offering."
Actually a better reason is you either click the button or you can't use the software you just paid for. The fact is you already purchased the right to use the software when you picked it up from Best Buy.
They can't add on additional caveats after you already purchased the software.
So the reason people click "I Agree" is because the EULA doesn't mean jack.. it's non enforcable since it takes place after-the-sale.