Slashdot Mirror
May I Have Your EULA Please?
LionsFate asks: "Just like the subject says. I want End User Licence Agreements (EULAs). I'm starting a database of as many EULAs as I can get. I want to know the first EULA that said we can't reverse engineer their software. I want to know the first that said they can watch our activities. I want to know how the NES agreement differs from the GameCube. Did Nintendo lighten, or tighten restrictions? I'm looking to generate a time-line of EULAs and how they have changed. What permissions we have been given, and taken away over that period. What rights did we have in Windows 3.1, compared to Windows XP? How has the MPAA and RIAA changed our 'legal rights' on software as a result of their effort? Watched Napster or other P2P software and seen the changes in their EULAs? I'm starting my EULA database at here and I need as many EULAs as I can get to populate the database. If you can, please email me any/all that you can. I'm hoping within a few weeks to have the site online." Ask Slashdot last tackled the topic of EULAs in this piece. It would be interesting to grab a nice sample of EULAs across the last 2 decades to see what has changed, if anything.
Don't a lot of EULA's have prohibitions against reprinting them in full in settings other than their original form?
Are you a bit worried about the legal ramifications of such a database?
I wish I had a kryptonite cross, because then you could keep Dracula and Superman away.
"...You agree not to post this EULA in a EULA database..."
-- Insert witty one-liner here. --
The eu has just put up a huge (70,000 pages)
site about europian rights
here's the link relating to unfair contracts in the uk
basicly it says you can ignore any shit or non plain language in the contracts, anything thats in contrntion lends to the side of the consumer.
all good stuff
thank God the internet isn't a human right.
If you really have time, you might want to try to make an English translation of the EULAs so you're not breaking the copyright on them.
One point to watch for would be the first EULA that prohibits publishing performance benchmarks. This is now fairly common for high-end software, and is one of the more evil provisions out there.
Provided you live somewhere civilised, of course, like Europe for example.
Has anybody counted up how many pages of EULAs you are obligated to read in order to install Windows XP with full updates? I think I'll put a running total on my webpage.
Essentially, Texas (and many other states) passed a building code "by reference." What this means is that they wrote a law saying, "Construction Company Consortium Foo has published a building code called Bar. It is now the law. Ask them for a copy." Builders are now requiored to follow a law they are not legally allowed to view, except by buying it from the industry association that wrote it.
Nope, no sig
http://www.osdn.com/terms.shtml
Of course, like all legal matters, Slashdot readers have the authoritative opinion. NOT. I'm not a lawyer, and I don't play one on TV. Usually.
-- Ken Kinder ken@_nospam_kenkinder.com http://kenkinder.com/
Tell ya what: gimme an account on yer FTP server and I'll upload them to you - you can do the work :)
ps: How many gigs ya got free?
db
Cig:
ôô
Someone out there wants to market a random EULA generator and they're using /. to make up the data!
Seriously, an EULA DB sounds like an excellent idea, but I have an implementation question. Have you considered marking them up in XML (a huge task, I'm sure) so that they can be searched for certain provisions? Reasoning here being that without good internal markup, you pretty much need to read through the whole EULA to compare it to another. Being able to search through the archive for different examples of specific clauses, specific allowances or provisions would be much more useful than simple searches for IE v.4 vs v.5
Good luck though, this is an excellent idea, and I like the idea of seeing included in a software reviews lines like: "...and the EULA scores a 3.4 of 5 on the standardized EULA Draconian scale..."
Most tech journalists fail to understand this -- evidenced by the ever-popular "New EULA Disclaims Implied Warranty of Merchantability!" articles.
Most EULAs do not contain new, inventive or clever language. After all, they're essentially standard form contracts -- otherwise known as boilerplate -- meaning that one choice of forum/ anti-reverse engineering clause looks pretty much like another.
I spent around a year (while at the Consumer Project on Technology) sifting through EULAs and contract related law, such as UCITA. Occaisionally, I would find an odd clause that appeared particularly draconian. I archived a few of those here.
The EULA clauses I found most fascinating were the ones that: 1. purported to limit benchmarks/criticism of a software title (McAfee), 2. Specified favorable choice of law/forum jurisdictions, 3. attempted to squelch parodies of a software publisher's title (Microsoft).
(yeah, I was the guy that submitted the previous, EULA harvesting Slashdot article). If you want any help dealing w/ EULAs, drop me a line.
Sincerely,
Vergil
Insects and Grafitti Photos
He is not stealing. Copyrighted materials are allowed to be reproduced as part of a critique of the material. He is obviously not trying to gain from the endeavor, but to critique the copyrighted works.
Texas (and many other states) passed a building code "by reference." What this means is that they wrote a law saying, "Construction Company Consortium Foo has published a building code called Bar. It is now the law. Ask them for a copy." Builders are now requiored to follow a law they are not legally allowed to view, except by buying it from the industry association that wrote it.
There's a challenge to the building code copyright, on the basis that the intent of the model code was for it to be written into law, so writing it into the law is fair use and then copies of the law are then not copyrighted (though the model code, with the identical words, still is).
Of course if that loophole for the building code pans out it won't apply to ELUAs. They were never passed into law by a legislature, so their copyrights (if any) are rock-solid.
They're a CONTRACT. As such they're the work product of one or more lawyers, probably a work-for-hire so the client owns the copyright. Contracts are allowed to be secret. Making a few extra copies of one you have signed or are considering might be fair use. But putting the full text of one in a database and publishing the database almost certainly isn't.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
The Fifth Circuit recently overruled that panel opinion, holding that people could not be barred by copyright from reading or copying "the law". See here for more.
-- Openlaw: Fighting for fair use and the public domain
We are $BIG_CORP. You're just an individual. Bend over like the bitch that you are because we have enough money and lawyers to crush any opposition you might present. Have a nice day, and enjoy your limited rights to use $BIG_CORP products.
I've thought about this myself. What I wanted to do was "color code" each phrase/sentence in the EULA, and come up with some "EULA-description markup language" for it. There would be a different color for each of these categories:
Redundant text (pink or gray maybe) - anything that repeats copyright law, i.e., "you may not distribute copies"
Dubious text (red) - anything that attempts to limit your rights further than copyright law, i.e., "you may not use this product to disparage microsoft" .. I call it dubious because this is the stuff that shouldn't be binding unless you've signed a contract.
Descriptive text (blue) - anything that describes the behavior of the product or the company, i.e., "if multiple versions of this product are detected, we will drop a bomb on your grandmother's house", or "this product will delete the competitor's product upon installation". This isn't really "license"-related, but describes the product.
Rights-granting text (green) - anything that says you have permission from the copyright holder to do things you're not otherwise allowed to do, i.e., "you may distribute copies verbatim if you include this copyright notice"
Filler text (light green) - this is junk that you should ignore completely, such as any "summaries" (if the license is binding, it's the LICENSE that's binding, not any summary they may have written for your benefit). This also includes the stuff in the GPL about "freedom", which is nice to know, but not necessary.
Imagine having each license color-coded like this, you could even view thumbnails of the licenses to see which one was best, showing the different blocks of color at a glance. For instance, the GPL would probably be all "Filler" and "Rights-granting" and you could visually see that it indeed is more "consumer-friendly" (lots of green) than the average microsoft license (lots of red).
Also note, any license that says "the terms of this license are subject to change" should be treated specially (for instance, all BRIGHT RED), since, for all intents and purposes, it may change *completely* at any time, and could conceivably be 100% Dubious and should be treated as such.
I'd love to see something like this combined with a database of licenses.
Ever heard of fair use? It's outlined in the copyright act explicitly exactly what people are allowed to copy and the conditions under which such copying is allowed.
Quoting EULA's, even if they are copyrighted, would be completely legal in the context of a compilation such as this, so long as suitable credit is given, as would be the case with any academic work. This sort of compilation is being put together in the interests of reseearch and education, so fair use applies.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
IANAL, but if someone were to discover the first EULA used in a piece of commercial software (that still bore some relevance to current EULAs), bought it from the original owner and decided to defend its patent on the EULA, couldn't this company then claim royalties from all other software companies for using EULAs that were "substantially identical"?
;-)
Better still, don't demand royalties, just prohibit anyone from using anything substantially identical to piss them all off
Code, Hardware, stuff like that.
I mean the license for the DVD consumer. The contract between MPAA and you.
There must be one. You see, under DMCA, you are violating the law every time you play a CSS-protected DVD, unless you have authorization to bypass the technological device that restricts access. If you have authorization, then bypassing wasn't circumvention. If you don't have authorization, then bypassing was circumvention.
And there is only one possible way that you can have this authorization: if you got it from them, somehow.
You either you got permission from them, and playing the DVD is legal, or you didn't, or you're a DMCA criminal.
Since MPAA attacked DeCSS, we can infer that this authorization is conditional; it doesn't just come with buying the DVD. They don't just say, "Anyone who buys our DVD may watch it." We know it's not that simple. But what the actual conditions are, or any other aspects of this deal is, remain highly mysterious. It might be that people with dark skin are not allowed to watch DVD. Or it may just have descriptions of the type of equipment that you're allowed to play it on, or something like that. Who knows?
The only way to know, is to see the text of the license that states under what conditions the end user is authorized to bypass the access control.
Whatever this license is, it's an interesting one, like the GPL, in that it actually grants you a power that you would otherwise not have (permission to watch the DVD, which would otherwise by prohibited by DMCA), in exchange for taking away other rights. Just as you can't redistribute a GPL program (a power you ordinarily wouldn't have) without either violating copyright law or agreeing to the GPL's terms, you can't watch a DVD without either violating the DMCA law or agreeing to the mystery license.
I think the license must remain secret, because if it were disclosed, it would be blatant evidence of product-tying and trigger Antitrust action. Of course, you shouldn't speak too loudly about the contract possibly having illegal terms in it, because if it's an illegal contract, then it's an invalid contract, and then you don't have authorization to watch DVDs. So if you want to watch the movie, shut your mouth.
To watch DVDs, we must be resigned to having agreed to a secret contract we'll never get to see the terms of. Does MPAA own your house? Are you sure?
As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
Don't be a dumbass.
Veeck v. SBCCI refers to law passed by a legislature. As law, it must be public. For that reason, the higher court overturned the ruling. A contract is a different beast, being an agreement between two parties, and may be private. A contract is not a law. Copyright applies.
Heh. One of the first things printed on the console by many early unices in the PDP-11 era was "RESTRICTED RIGHTS". This goes back a lot further than one thinks.
Washington, DC: It's like Hollywood for ugly people.
How about this... Perhaps you don't want to buy the software, take it home, open the box, find out you can't accept the EULA, and then discover on attempting to return it that you can't get your money back either? I think this concept is interesting because it opens up another front that software companies will need to compete on (at least for users who know enough to check the site first). After all, one of the most evil bits about EULAs in my opinion is that they don't let you see it until it's too late to decide whether or not to spend the money.
--Fesh
Kill -9 'em all, let root@localhost sort 'em out.
I tried this 2 to 3 weeks ago. I bought a copy of MS Money from Staples, took it home, started the installation since there was no paper copy of the EULA till I got to the EULA, printed out the EULA, and took it back for a refund.
I fully expected to get the runaround. The store saying they don't give refunds while MS tells me to take it back to the store. To my surprise, I managed to talk the manager into giving me a refund. (That makes me 3 for 3 on obtaining refunds on opened software. The first two had nothing to do with EULA issues.)
The turning point was the printed EULA. The text on the box said "return for a refund" without specifing where or how to do the return. However, the EULA said "return to the place of purchase for a refund".
I had highlighted the "magic phrase" and pointed out that they were authorized resellers of MS software and asked why they weren't honoring the EULA. At that point, the manager made a copy of that page of the EULA and gave me a cash refund.
An interesting sidenote. Money actually installed all the software before showing the EULA. I had to finesse the question: "Did you install the software?" I answered: "I went as far as I had to until I was able to read the EULA".
I am convinced, although I have no proof, based on my conversations with managers when obtaining refunds on software, that MS not only knows, but requires, stores to have the "no refund" policy.
I feel like picking a fight with everyone who thinks they are right. - Rainmakers