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Shrinkwrapped Books
NortWind writes "I just saw this in the InfoWorld paper, in the "The Gripe Line" by Ed Foster. It describes how a "...book arrived wrapped in plastic with a shrinkwrap license on the front". Just when you thought it couldn't get any worse..." I wrote an essay about this a year or two ago.
By opening this shrink-wrap you agree to the terms and conditions of the agreement.
To see the agreement, open the book to page 1.
For technical assistance call 724-987-1192, however, by calling this number you release us from any obligation of helping you.
Thank you and have a good day.
With my dying breath, I curse Zoidberg!
If the license agreement was to be taken seriously, he either had to go to the trouble of trying to ship the book back or he had to become an Omnicare customer somehow.
I'd just trash it and forget it. It's illegal to send unsolicited items and then try to collect for it - just because they slap a boilerplate on something that arrives unsolicited in your mail you can still just treat it like any bulk business mail, crapcan it. All they are claiming ownership rights to is the contents. If you want to get in a moral quandrary over it, or become play the OmniCare game that's fine too.
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Anything that is mailed unsolicited to a person belongs to that person. Period. The postal code is extremely clear on this point.
There used to be a lot of scams where companies would send products to people along with a bill, figuring that enough people would pay to make it worth it. For one thing, the company did not provide return postage, so any return would be at the customer's expense.
Each and every one of those doctors now owns the book that was sent to them. I suggest they throw away the shrinkwrap, and use them for doorstops.
Books for classes have been doing this for years. Some have shrinkwrap licenses, though most have software that generally gets unused in the class, but is just there to make resale of the book harder. It's starting a mini-cottage industry of small booksellers that don't care about the license and will buy and sell the used book no matter what, as opposed to the large campus store that needs to comply with the bookseller's corporate "licensing" terms.
The book came unsolicited in the mail. The only rights the person who sent it may have are what is afforded by standard copyright. The physical object, the book, belongs to the recipient to use in a fair manner consistant with the local copyright laws no matter what the meaningless piece of paper says. They cannot give themselves the right to take the book away at a later date. The stuff about not being able to share the information with anybody is crap too.
Basically this is an article about a publisher being stupid and wasting paper; probably not nearly as much paper as the company that publishes "Internet Explorer for Dummies," so if you want to harrass somebody, you'd be better off harassing them.
Books that comes with a license are NOT new. It's not at all unusual to receive books of documentation when one signs a non-disclosure agremeent (NDA). That's not the unusual part.
There are two new aspects to this idea. I'm not a lawyer, so perhaps the more legal minded can answer these.
First, can I attach a shrinkwap license to anything? It seems well accepted for software. But what about apples? Can I enforce a shrinkwrap agreement that says you won't sell the apple to somebody else?
Second, are you bound by a shrink wrap license one receives unsolicited through the mail? One is *not* bound to return anything or even acknowledge merchandise that one receives unsolicitied through the mail.
It is perfectly legal for somebody to send you something with the suggestion that you return money in exchange. In fact, that's protected by the First Amendment, which is why it's so hard to make some companies to take you off their mailing list.
But if they try to collect money from you in exchange for the goods (or demand you send it back at your expense) by claiming that a contract exists, that's unenforceable. There were some abusive practices in the 60s, and now this practice is explicitly named unenforceable.
Of course, back then I think the problem was charities counting on guilt as much as anything else. Now it's outright scam artists sending unsolicited toner, fax supplies, etc., with overpriced POs. A tightly run company will have a single vendor and can tell them to shove off, but many companies will automatically pay low-value POs for office supplies.
For every complex problem there is an answer that is clear, simple, and wrong. -- H L Mencken
http://www.usps.com/websites/depart/inspect/merch. htm
Every month I would send a new invoice for the elapsed period, less payments, plus any late payment fees and interest.
When the total amount owed exceeded the local small-claims limit, I would confiscate the licensors' property for auction and file suit to recover the debt.
Mark the book "Refused - return to sender", and put it back in the mail box. The USPS will return the book to the sender and charge them for doing so, thus costing the sender more money. Plus, they now have all these books to get rid of.
www.eFax.com are spammers