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Robolawyer to Handle Clickwraps?
adelord writes "Recently Wired published an essay by Mark D. Rasch describing the need for a 'browser-based automaton that could be adjusted to match your tolerance for legal mumbo jumbo' to help the user navigate the torrent of user agreements most of us click through without reading. Is this a job for Google Labs, and if not, who else would write the software for it? Do you think it is a good idea? While the legal exposure from writing software that partially fills the role of a lawyer could be enormous, I sure that it would have an ironclad user agreement that I would simply click through in my excitement to use it."
The dangers of knowledge trigger emotional distress in human beings.
no perl script is going to give you legal advice. End of story.
...they would have to develop a mechanical hand that could pick your pocket.
Hmmmm. If they end up with a product that works as hit-and-miss as Babelfish, wouldn't that jeopordize the correct translation of legalese? Are you still bound to the original mumbo-jumbo if you only understood a flawed translation? Doesn't seem feasable. Why not just dumb down the actual legal language?
a kind of software like this should work like a spell checker, and highlight the chrunchy parts.
Only morons moderate based on a sig.
I just see, looking through my "translated" agreement: You can't agree to this if you are reading an interpreted form.
it would make more sense to me for someone to write software that would track down the author, or the authoring firm, of each eula down and deliver small electric shocks to them via their keyboards (size of shock could be user-specified).
The only way to get rid of a temptation is to yield to it.
-Oscar Wilde
"I am sorry Dave. I cannot allow you to agreee to this agreement."
No spyware would play by the rules. They'd do everything they could to bypass the robo lawyer bot thingy. And how would you - as the article implies - install this software *before* you install your OS?
Infospace aquired Millet software in 2000, Millet software had a product called "Privacy Bank" Which did exactly what this article is describing. The only hard part is that it doesn't scale well, because there isn't a text parser on earth good enough to unwrap the intent of the legalese in most EULAs. So either you have to employ an army of well trained EULA readers or get individual sites to submit to a cleanroom EULA with Infospace's language so that the software can know exactly what is allowed/disallowed.
-*The above statement is printed entirely on recycled electrons*-
anything would be better than now, currently everyone just clicks 'agree' w/o knowing what the hell they're agreeing to. leaves the door open for users to get the shaft for sure, plus, you should never agree to anything w/o knowing what you're agreeing to.
speaking of, please vote. thanks
CV&*$@#@#$B
free ipod and free gmail!
We at Google Labs have no implementing or releasing a EULA bot (codename: geulabot) at this time.
However, we have designed a completely new legal code that is compatable with existing code, but is much, much more efficient.
Dont agree to them. Simplest way to deal with EULAs. They offer you a contract, you decline it. Optionally you can offer a more reasonable contract to them, perhaps as detailed in the SVLA. The GPL is pretty much the only EULA I agree to these days.
While the fact that legal documents have a very set structure and certain terms are required to be used a certain way in certain documents would help the "robolawyer" parse the documents, when you start getting into jurisdiction changes, differing court judgments on certain clauses, as well as potential legal liability for bad judgment calls made by the "robolawyer," you might just be better off with a Magic 8-Ball.
Of course, the same would apply to an actual lawyer nowadays, but the Magic 8-Ball is less likely to countersue you into oblivion.
RomSteady - I came, I saw, I tested. GamerTag: RomSteady / http://www.romsteady.net
Will they make 3 movies about Robolawyer?
Perl scripts are too ethical to act like a lawyer.
A privacy policy is just that - a policy. Most of them also say they are subject to change at any time and without notice. This means a site can change policy every night at 3:00am and sell your information and switch the policy back at 4:00am. It's a policy, not a law, and not a contract. If people knew whats best for them, they'd almost never agree to any of it. The solution is to make click-through crap invalid. That of course, would put this fucker out of a job. Damn!
Just as long as Robolawyer started his response with : "IANAL, but...."
This is ridiculous, michael. Why even post this crap. Legal "mumbo-jumbo" exists to protect someone, and is therefore of ultimate importance to be kept AS IS. Changing it with some automated software to "simplify it" is altering the terms of the agreement, which I'm sure wouldn't fly AT ALL in a court of law in nearly any jurisdiction world-wide. How is this "news for nerds, stuff that matters"? This most certainly DOES NOT matter.
to expain the first robolawyer's EULA?
I'm trying to imagine the convoluted and restrictive EULA they would have to slap onto a piece of software designed to essentially give you legal advice. Aiee, I'm caught in an infinite loop!
I can summarize it in half a paragraph: don't agree to anything that doesn't come from a legitimate organization or individual you recognize and trust, and that thing you just clicked says, you can do pretty much whatever you want with this thing except sell it, but we're not responsible for ANYTHING that happens as a result of your using it.
Show me a legitimately published example of someone running afoul in some significant way of a click-through agreement and I'll believe this is worth anyone's resources. Willfully downloading things like DumbassCursor or Scumgator Bwoser Buddy don't count: there is no software in the world that can provide a proof against individual stupidity.
It Is the Nature of Information to Transgress Artificial Boundaries
do we get RoboLAPDCops to beat down and mangle anyone who breaks their end of the deals signed by the RoboLawyer on our behalf?
Click here or a puppy gets stomped!
I'd prefer it if we just required companies to add summaries to their legal aggreements. Like a little bit at the top that says thing like
* You're not allowed to re-sell this software
* We can use our update feature to install whatever we want on your computer
* Your soul belongs to us
Followed by all the legal mumbo jumbo required to make it all hold up in a court.
man, I sure would love a robohooker to handle my software. diggity-diggity-diggity
My first thought is, if you have a peice of software "signing" these EULAs for you -- who's bound by the "contract?"
I could imagine EULAs having a ``metafield'' which would have values like: GPL, BSD, Unknown Proprietary, Not Specified. You could set your browser to click through known, approved licenses. I'm not sure that would be valuable, though; those that are generally known and widely regarded as innocuous are the ones that don't usually hassle you in the first place.
I'd rather see some effort put into enforcing the first sale doctrine, and invalidating EULAs and clickthroughs in court, myself.
See what I've been reading.
lawyers can't agree on what a contract specifies...
Now add an extra layer of "it wasn't me it was robolawyer that told me this was ok"
My penguin ate my sig
The purpose behind P3P is that it really distills the privacy down to a few multiple choice questions. Thus, there isn't a need for an army of readers - the robolawyer could automatically check the answers to the multiple choice questions... after all, those answers are machine readable.
Since the browser sends a string to the server (indicating browser type and stuff), why not include my terms in the string including "your servers response to this http request indicates your acceptance of these terms". Any response by the server then means they agree.
Are they on suprnova yet?
The problem here is that any such browser would be publiclly available, INCLUDING to the lawyers writing EULA's. This makes it gameable.
If you want to slip something by people, write it up, and run it through the robot. If it gets flagged, reword and try again. Add clauses, references, pointers to other sections, etc. Repeat until it's NOT picked up.
Now, you'll assume the EULA is vetted, but it's not actually.
...especially for any attorney or layperson who lent their talents to the software for translating EULAs. The big question is whether it would be the equivalent of the practice of law. Additionally, would a service like this be the equivalent of beginning an attorney-client relationship between the end-user and the people who helped create and distribute the software?
Quite honestly, I don't know. Like most issues where IT and the law merge, it's a murky area at best. The U.S. legal system is woefully inadequately equipped to handle complex IT litigation, largely because our judges aren't necessarily the most computer-savvy folks on the planet. I've always been a big advocate of creating a separate court system for IT issues, similar to how there are separate patent courts.
At any rate, it just sounds like hassle waiting to happen.
"I do not regret the things I have done, but those that I did not do."
I have read a couple of EULAs and I don't think I have ever understood 100% of the implications it contained. If there was a summary of intent that consisted of a few basic points, where a user could agree or disagree to each of the points, I think more people would understand just what they have agreed to.
GENERATION 25: The first time you see this, copy it into your sig on any forum and add 1 to the generation. Social exper
Will someone please mod this obvious flamebait down?
OK, slightly off topic, sorry.
I'd like to see EULAs standardised. Then instead of reams of unreadable gobbledegook on each installer, you'd get something like "This is a Type 1 EULA", or "This is a Type 4 EULA with the following differences" and so on. Once you know what a Type 1 EULA is, anything that describes itself as such, you know exactly what it's all about and can determine quickly what exactly you need to do.
No way this would fly.
EULAs are not legitimate contracts and the GPL is neither a EULA or a contract.
What we need is software which changes the text of the "I agree" button to "What the Hell? No, I don't agree, just install it". In very fine print, of course.
I remember an article a while back that offered an idea to 'modularize' legalese into known entities that could be engineered up into the final document. Should something like that come to be, making a parser for the known patterns would be much easier.
Seems like a job for Asimov's interpretative analysis, though rather hard to code down, i guess...
What if someone put together the most common paragraphs, and a government agency tracked them and gave them all numbers? That way, you could set up your preferences with your browser to permit whatever standard agreements were fine with you. Then, you'd only need to read or be suscipicious of EULAs that had nonstandard language.
Rome wasn't bilked in a day.
It indeed does contain the usual technobabble and typos (eg: NO UNLAWFUL OR PROHBIITED USE), but some parts of it stood out, especially those related to the DMCA.
I quote the parts that caused concerns, especially given the fact that /. has covered stories in the past about companies (ISPs/etc) taking down content upon receiving a DMCA notice, without paying much attention to user's rights etc (no time to dig them up right now):
After receiving a claim of infringement, OSTG will process and investigate notices of alleged infringement and will take appropriate actions under the DMCA and other applicable intellectual property laws. Upon receipt of notices complying or substantially complying with the DMCA, OSTG will act expeditiously to remove or disable access to any material claimed to be infringing or claimed to be the subject of infringing activity, and will act expeditiously to remove or disable access to any reference or link to material or activity that is claimed to be infringing. OSTG will take reasonable steps to expeditiously notify the subscriber that it has removed or disabled access to such material.
Upon receipt of a proper counter notification under the DMCA, OSTG will promptly provide the person who provided the initial notification of claimed infringement with a copy of the counter notification and inform that person that it will replace the removed material or cease disabling access to it in ten (10) to fourteen (14) business days. Additionally, OSTG will replace the removed material and cease disabling access to it ten (10) to fourteen (14) business days following receipt of the counter notice, unless OSTG's designated agent first receives notice from the person who submitted the initial notification that such person has filed an action seeking a court order to restrain the subscriber from engaging in infringing activity relating to the material on the OSTG system or network.
You may provide us with a counter notification by providing our copyright agent the following information in writing: ...
An interesting read to see /. and OSTG's legal stand on DMCA, "Your rights online", etc.
PS: This is *not* intended to be flamebait...in today's legal-trigger happy world and the quality of "justice", an organization would probably be wise to cover it's bases. It was just something I thought was interesting.
An Indian-American Hindu committed to non-violent thought/speech/action alarmed by the global explosion of radical Islam
because they have no way to confirm that the clicker is legally able to consent. Personally, I let my 10-year-old click for me.
Instead of a Robolawyer how about a program that detects EULA and then opens up a new brower page that is linked to a community run website (somelike like Wikipedia, but with more security so that malware writers can't get in there and change things)
This page would display dumbed down information about the EULA that you or I could understand.
I.e:
"Crockbot2004"
This EULA would like you to agree to the following:
I will allow "Crockbot 2004" to:
1. monitor my browing and send information about it periodically to a server. This transfer will not be sanitized to remove personal information
2. download ads and display them on my computer
3. execute abitrary code and utilize my network connection
So a human would do the decyphering, the Eula-robo would simply have to fetch the information.
And then I as a user could go "Woah, I don't want to download illegal mp3s that badly!" and cancel the install.
-paridel
P3P does NOT require parsing of natural language. Go here to get more information
The funny thing is that if a RoboLawyer did exist, you'd probably have to use a clickwrap license to download it in the first place.
Eric
Vioxx recall reduces spam
For geeks, I think the pure technical challenge presented in creating a heuristic EULA reader would push any geeks limits. Plus, as far as training, it would allow said geek to become an expert in an inter-disciplinary subject.
And what about the legal challenges? I don't recall in the article that said robolawyer would change the EULA...BUT, what this robolawyer could do, just like heuristic spam filters, is warn you of ambigious or harmful clauses. You check out the flagged clause, google it, then make an educated decision (or consult with a lawyer, if you can). If said clause appears in a future EULA that you deemed unacceptable, then the robolawyer would have an easier time filtering out a bad EULA. This article is certainly provocative, and needs to be considered by us geeks.
Plus, I honestly don't see how your post is insightful, but so be it.
I'm sure that Emacs could do it ;-)
Let me explain myself. Above all, IANAL. But something that always puzzles me is the enphasys put in someone reading the EULA. I mean, sometimes, they actually make you scroll the EULA all the way to the bottom before letting you click the "I Accept" botton.
Again, I'm not a lawyer, but if so much effort is put by the Soft. companies in the fact that you read the EULA, must be to save their asses.
Why is it that by default, the focus is in the "I do NOT Accept"? So that you don't click it automatically. Why not? So that if you ever want to complain about the EULA, the soft company can argue they did everything in their power to stop you from accepting without reading it first.
What happens if you have some program like this installed? Will they be as protected as when you read it through (scroll down)? Will you be able to argue: "I didn't know you were selling my email address!"
I'm not sure, so this isn't an authoritative comment, these are just my thoughts.
Is there a standard out there with prewritten legal blocks that can be referred to by reference number? I figure it'd be nifty if I can log onto a web site.. select a few clauses I want.. then fill in blanks Madlibs style. Then I can perhaps pay a fee for the service to check for loopholes.
But the real benefit would be the reverse translation for those reading the legal document such a service can provide. Each clause has a "simplification" that can be dynamically produced by my customer who is browsing over the agreement hosted.
With so many companies standardizing on the same agreements, I figure this is easy to do.
I'm just a simple Robolawyer. Your world frightens and confuses me.
A legal-ese bot would be a bit difficult. I just think all click-throughs should include a link to an FAQ about that specific agreement.
On a similar note, I'm surprised there aren't more online arbitration sites (for EULA and other disputes). Anyone used one of those?
bug.gd: error search engine. Humanity working together to solve all errors.
Here's my thought. Design a click through thing that just blindly accepts any legal agreement without showing it to the user. The name of the program is something like "agree to disagree". This calls into question the validity of any agreement that (a) you weren't shown and (b) did not have direct control over and (c) which you installed something to avoid dealing with.
While the company that presented the agreement will have a record of a URL hit by you with a form with a certain radio button set, when it comes time to deal with a lawsuit it won't stand up in court because the form submission was automated. To make a bizarre metaphor, if I hand a screaming monkey a rubber stamp with my name on it, I am not bound by any contracts the screaming rubber-stamp-wielding monkey accidentally stamps.
Second idea is to publish your personal conditions and email them to the company or include the URL in some form submission. Once you have a situation where your conditions conflict with theirs and the only "signatures" are form submission records, they are going to have a difficult time proving that there was an actual agreement in the legal sense of the word.
I just cross my fingers and think to myself that clickthrough EULAs can't really be legally binding and then I click away!
the preceding comment is my own and in no way reflects the opinion of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
A system like this is a complex language-parsing utility that can connect its analysis of a text with a database of appropriate knowledge--legal, in this case. It must also have the ability to discriminate between levels of complexity to appropriately disclude certain information. That's the easy 90% of creating an AI. You could cut out the legal database. That's not too important. But the only other way to simplify a EULA summarization utility would be to match the pattern of each clause with a member of a predefined set of proto-clauses and parse the whole expression based on unique keywords; from that point there would be a dictionary that would instruct the utility to omit the clause or summarize it in a particular manner. The former method is much more certain than the latter, which is liable to omit clauses that you should read and display ones that don't matter. However, the latter method is more reasonable.
"I agreed to WHAT ?!!!!"
the preceding comment is my own and in no way reflects the opinion of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
I think that attorneys should be required to write agreements so that a 6 year old can understand it, and be required to test it on 20 6 year olds. This goes for laws too.
If there isn't 100% agreement on the interperetation of it, by the 6 year olds, it's too complex.
Alternatively each agreement needs a banner that says:
"Warning: you cannot possibly understand this agreement, you must consult an attorney before agreeing to this. Failure to do so will result in you unknowingly violating this agreement, or agreeing to something which you don't understand."
Otherwise you are misleading the user by presenting them with a document they don't understand, and by expecting them to agree to it then and there, are implying that the agreement is understandable by the average layperson, which virtually none are.
Technically, every action you take in your daily life, should be approved by an attorney, since ignorance of the law is no excuse for breaking it.
You can't possibly understand the legal implications of doing anything except eating, crapping, and sleeping. Even then, you are doing some risky stuff, depending on how you go about it.
What's to keep someone from simply denying the whole experience? The authoring company has no record of the acceptance, and no proof that the eula was actually ever presented to the end-user.
In a regular contract dispute (which is what eula cases devolve into), the plaintiff must first prove that the defendant accepted the terms of the contract. With nothing more than a supposed click-through, the authoring company doesn't really have any proof of acceptance. I can't see how a legal case against an end-user for 'violation' could get very far in this context.
Have you seen how Creative Commons does it?
Very plain english to me:
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/2.0/
why can't that be a model for the commercial stuff?
I don't know if the whole thing can be taken seriously, but a nice possible side effect could be that there would be no more expensive lawyers helping the rich out, but the poor guy could have an equal robot for free. ;)
No matter how much money you have, it's lawbot 1.2 vs lawbot 1.2 in court.
Reminds me of pokemon but with robolawyers
Artists against online scams http://www.aa419.org/
I'd rather see some effort put into enforcing the first sale doctrine, and invalidating EULAs and clickthroughs in court, myself. Wasn't this recently tested in a federal circuit court that found it was legal to nullify your "first sale" rights in the EULA? I swear slashdot had a headline to that effect sometime in the past 2 weeks.
-*The above statement is printed entirely on recycled electrons*-
Sales volume is inversely proportional to EULA clarity, therefore if you make EULAs 'super' clear, you will jepodise the sales of many consumer goods. EULAs would often look something like this:
-This disk won't work with other players
-You can't use this phone on any other network
-This software may not be secure and if you loose your data its not our fault
-You cannot copy this CD, it will not work in some players
-This player will not let you skip adverts on DVDs that you have bought, you will have to watch them even though you paid
-You are not buying this disk, you are buying a license to use it, we have the right to revoke it at any time without question or refund
You see, the economy relies on sub-standard goods, buy clarifying EULAs you are screwing with the economy.
This comment does not represent the views or opinions of the user.
This whole concept is would only be viable if legislation mandated that EULAs had to be constructed in a "modular" manner with individual provisions conforming to set standards. If the software had to actually read and comprehend the so called legalese, well, good luck, because it's hard for most people let alone computers. Furthermore the English language is flexible enough and computers dumb enough that it would be quite simple to stimy the computer software in question (think of spam and filtering software).
we have to develop a law definition language.
then get it widely adopted, and get it mandatory for all licenses to be shown in this language.
then we could have automated evaluation methods, comparision, etc.
How does this compare to IBM's P3P? I know privacy policy and EULA are kinda similar in a way; a EULA can have a Privacy Policy... Why not just expand on IBM's P3P idea to cover the EULA or whatever for web sites?
09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0
What would work well for me is if they assigned version numbers to their click-through agreements like GNU does. If I downloaded Windows Service Pack 27 and it popped up MS User Agreement 4.7 and I had recently agreed to version 4.5 then I would only need to review the changes between agreement 4.5 and 4.7 and I could click comfortably.
As it currently stands they probably have legal rights to my firstborn and any proceeds from the sale of stock for Tahiti-based companies.
Coding Blog
If you think about licenses, people will say this license is "GPL Compatible", or that one isn't.
Wouldn't it be interesting to encapsulate the most common atoms of a software license, so a company could select from a few well-understood license components. You would add the concept that if you're SEL (standard eula license) 1.0 compatible, than you can't add any sneaky gotchas to your license. Then you could add a section of eula codes to your license that a client could parse.
I think that in the future AI lawyers will become an essential part of our world. The legal system is too complicated and counterintuitive for the average person to understand without undue effort. It would be nice to be able to feed a document into an expert system and get a reasonably simple explanation, or to describe a planned activity such as starting a certain kind of business and get a reliable opinion on the chance of it being legal. Such a system could keep a lot of small business people from wandering into legal minefields, and might even lighten the load on the tort system.
As a future lawyer I have to say that this is a really really bad idea.
I'm trying to think of good reasons other then just self-preservation. But, I can't think of any right now.
There have been small steps in this direction, most notably the World Wide Web Consortium's Platform for Privacy Preferences Project. Unfortunately P3P, as it's known, is limited to relatively simple matters of online privacy, ignoring other kinds of online contracts like software license agreements, ISP policies, and terms of service contracts.
That's true, and it's because it took P3P about five years to figure out the appropriate terminology and concepts relating to online privacy. The technology is pretty simple; its the range of possibilities (the ontology, if you will) that's so hard.
This is just like coming up with a universal scheme for addresses and other common business structures; it's possible, but getting enough people to agree on the details to get momentum takes a lot of time and effort (see UBL).
It only has four outputs though.
1) You are screwed
2) You are really screwed
3) You are going to be screwed
4) k.
no
Wouldn't it be possible to handle EULAs with a bayesian filter? Just like they handle spam?
One would have to read through quite many EULAs for it to effective, but if one created an online database, which collected information from people (in the best case lawyers) who have actually read and agreed upon the EULAs.Then one lets them do a survey about which kinds of EULAs they do agree with.
Then the user could also do such a survey(in the form of: Do you agree with that they do collect information about which internet pages you vist? ([ ] Yes [x] No and so on...), and the program would get the data from the database corresponding to the kinds of EULAs the user is ready to agree upon.
Then the user then could give a EULA to the program, and it would tell him with which probability he's likely to agree upon the EULA.
The database would have to have quite many entries though, but I'm sure it would work some way or another.
Any program that parses data can be analyzed and fed data that is intended to trick the parser. Even if the parser was only allowed to say yes to certain things and no to anything else that wasn't of this specific text, there would still be two problems. 1) if a company legitimately changes the wording to something "robolawyer" is unfamiliar with, it's going to automatically say no. would you create a "learning robolawyer"? 2) companies could still analyze the way "robolawyer" processes the text and possibly abuse it by putting important clauses into comment like areas for example. All in all, a horrible idea. What SHOULD be done is some type of standardized agreement system enforced by the government, put into law, if you will. Have pre-written clauses for particular types of items, should be easy to cover general software and it's responsibilities relating to screwing up your machine or you reselling the software. The EULA would then consist of links and ref numbers for which clauses they are including and the full text as well, but with the initial guarantee that it is unchanged from the pre-written clauses. Then users would feel more comfortable knowing that they were not being tricked into something unusual!
You've violated their copyright using a technological measure ("copy and paste") to violate their copy protection system ("ASCII byte-encryption").
I'm writing a letter to OSTG right now. Expect your post to disappear expeditiously.
The GPL is a copyright license.
So the funny part is that you DON'T have to agree to it unless you want to distribute copies. I can't remember the last time I actually invoked the GPL (because on client machines I download the GPL'd software directly, thus bypassing the trigger).
But please don't call it an "agreement", it's a "license" plain and simple.
Any program that parses data can be analyzed and fed data that is intended to trick the parser.
Even if the parser was only allowed to say yes to certain things and no to anything else that wasn't of this specific text, there would still be two problems.
1) if a company legitimately changes the wording to something "robolawyer" is unfamiliar with, it's going to automatically say no. would you create a "learning robolawyer"?
2) companies could still analyze the way "robolawyer" processes the text and possibly abuse it by putting important clauses into comment like areas for example.
All in all, a horrible idea.
What SHOULD be done is some type of standardized agreement system enforced by the government, put into law, if you will.
Have pre-written clauses for particular types of items, should be easy to cover general software and it's responsibilities relating to screwing up your machine or you reselling the software. The EULA would then consist of links and ref numbers for which clauses they are including and the full text as well, but with the initial guarantee that it is unchanged from the pre-written clauses.
Then users would feel more comfortable knowing that they were not being tricked into something unusual!
The Mozilla Foundation want to make users agree to the following EULA before installing Firefox. Looks like a lot of legalese, but might it not make Firefox non-free?
==
LICENSE AGREEMENTS
YOU MUST AGREE TO THE FOLLOWING LICENSE AGREEMENTS TO USE THE MOZILLA FIREFOX BROWSER AND ANY ACCOMPANYING SOFTWARE COMPONENTS. WHEN YOU INSTALL MOZILLA FIREFOX YOU WILL BE GIVEN THE OPTION OF INSTALLING ADDITIONAL COMPONENTS FROM MOZILLA AND THIRD PARTY PROVIDERS. THE MOZILLA FIREFOX END-USER LICENSE AGREEMENT GOVERNS USE OF ALL OF THE COMPONENTS. TO USE MOZILLA FIREFOX AND ANY OF THE OTHER AVAILABLE COMPONENTS, YOU MUST AGREE TO THE MOZILLA BROWSER END USER LICENSE AGREEMENT. ALL OF THE ADDITIONAL COMPONENTS AVAILABLE FOR DOWNLOAD WITH MOZILLA FIREFOX ARE REFERRED TO COLLECTIVELY HEREIN AS THE "COMPONENTS."
MOZILLA FIREFOX END-USER LICENSE AGREEMENT
Redistribution Or Rental Not Permitted
BY CLICKING THE "ACCEPT" BUTTON OR INSTALLING OR USING THE MOZILLA FIREFOX SOFTWARE OR ANY COMPONENTS, YOU ARE CONSENTING TO BE BOUND BY AND BECOME A PARTY TO THIS MOZILLA FIREFOX END USER LICENCE AGREEMENT (THE "AGREEMENT"), AS THE "LICENSEE."
IF YOU DO NOT AGREE TO THE TERMS AND CONDITIONS OF THIS AGREEMENT, YOU MUST NOT CLICK THE "ACCEPT" BUTTON, YOU MUST NOT INSTALL OR USE THE MOZILLA FIREFOX SOFTWARE OR ANY OF THE COMPONENTS, AND YOU DO NOT BECOME A LICENSEE UNDER THIS AGREEMENT.
1. INTRODUCTION. As used in this Agreement,"Licensor" shall mean Mozilla Foundation. The use of the Components shall be governed by this Agreement. In this Agreement, "Product" refers to the Mozilla Firefox browser and any of the Components that Licensee has elected to install. If more than one license agreement was provided for the Product, and the terms vary, the order of precedence of those license agreements is as follows: a signed agreement, a license agreement available for review on the Mozilla.org website, a printed agreement provided with the Product, an electronic agreement provided with the Product.
2. LATENT DISTRIBUTION OF COMPONENTS. The Components are installed through different mechanisms in order to ensure that the Mozilla Firefox download will be quick and convenient. In some cases the entire Component is downloaded concurrently with Mozilla Firefox and in others a small piece of software (the "Stub") will be installed initially with Mozilla Firefox that can then "call out" over the Internet to a web server and complete installation of the Component on your computer at a later time (i) during the installation process, (ii) when the Stub detects that you have available bandwidth or (iii) when you have requested use of a function that requires such Component.
3. LICENSE GRANT. Licensor grants Licensee a non-exclusive and non-transferable license to install and use for personal or internal business purposes the executable code version of the Product, provided any copy must contain all of the original proprietary notices. This license does not entitle Licensee to receive from Licensor hard-copy documentation, technical support, telephone assistance, or enhancements or updates to the Product.
4. RESTRICTIONS. Except as otherwise expressly permitted in this Agreement, or in another Licensor agreement to which Licensee is a party, Licensee may not: (i) modify or create any derivative works of the Product or documentation, including customization, translation or localization; (ii) decompile, disassemble, reverse engineer, or otherwise attempt to derive the source code for the Product (except to the extent applicable laws specifically prohibit such restriction, or the underlying ideas or algorithms of the Product; (iii) redistribute, encumber, sell, rent, lease, sublicense, or otherwise transfer rights to the Product; (iv) remove or alter any trademark, logo, copyright or other proprietary notices, legends, symbols or labels in the Product;(v) use the Product in any way that violates any Terms of Service or Privacy Policy that apply to Licensee or any laws; (vi) authori
Joe Llywelyn Griffith Blakesley
[This post is in the public domain (copyright-free) unless otherwise stated]
EULAs and clickthroughs will not be invalidated in court as long as they are reasonable. The courts consider "reasonable" the ability for you not to use the software (or return it within a short period of time).
The case you are recalling (where the court explicitly defined what it thinks is reasonable) is probably Blizzard v. bnetd where the EULA preventing reverse engineering (among other things). The EULA was held up as a valid contract. There was no "first sale" involved at all per the above situation with software being licensed.
This article hints at something I've wanted to brainstorm around for a long time now: implementing laws and arguments as a suite of views on a set of data, instead of as they both currently are implemented: flat documents in the legislative and judicial respectively.
Pushes for plain-text legislation, while noble in intent, I take to be infeasable due to the innumerable intricacies of law--that is to say, there is no simple yet effective way to express certain complex legalities. But if instead of having one, and only one phrasing of a law, EULA, judicial argument, or whatever, we allow several VIEWS (ie phrasings intended for a specific audience) of the DATA (the semi-immutable concept that the document attempts to express).
We already accomplish this in lesser forms: an "executive summary" as part of a document is a classic example of rephrasing the meaning of a document for a specific audience.
Imagine if we wrote laws with a legaleese view, a summary view, a plain-english view, and a technical/medical/whatever'sapplicable view. The public would be served by reading the summary, nonlawyers that want to monitor their government would have the plainenglish, and specialists in the subjectmatter would have their applicable view. "How could that work, there's too much chance for conflict and deceit among the several views?" you may ask. We already undertake such a human risk when judges review law for interpretation. Only in this scenario, instead of one phrasing, the judge has MULTIPLE valid phrasings, each with it's own context, from which to pull interpretation. A natural heirarchy of where to pull what meaning could be established: If --a-- detail in the legaleese completely contradicts the basis of the executive summary, the summary holds more weight, as the summary is where one would state "overall intent". Contrarily, if the --totality-- of details in the legaleese and plain-english draw a conclusion other than the summaries', the summary is in need of revision.
I see applicability well beyond just laws, but they make for a good first thought. Eventually, I could even see this implemented as a document format where switching between views are as difficult as following hyperlinks, and view-preference-options are standardized so one can surf the net as different levels of readers. (patent it first and i got yer prior art right here, bitch ^_-) I could even see slashmoderation as a worthwhile inclusion to the concept.
Anyway, the whole idea's pretty alpha in my mind, and I'd love other ppl's thoughts.
Has anyone patented it yet? Seems a good thing to patent.
egrep 'soul|firstborn' EULA.doc
Some mornings it's hardly worth chewing through the restraints to get out of bed.
What if EULAs were to take the form of a checklist of (mostly) preset clauses? I.e., Clause #1 is "This is an agreement between [Company Name] and you, the user..." and so on; #35 is "Severability..." and so on; and after a while you have many standardized clauses with their EULA can signal by code. Your robolawyer would then just show you the checklist; any custom clauses would just be shown to you, possibly with warning tags pointing out unusual or consternation-causing strings ("hold harmless", "pay", "banana pudding", etc.). Wanna be extra geeky, make EULAs conform to an XML spec for these purposes.
"A great democracy must be progressive or it will soon cease to be a great democracy." --Theodore Roosevelt
is give context for the existing text rather than simplify it.
For example, the 'robolawyer' could identify whole sentences and paragraphs that are widely used, like the typical paragraph giving the user limited rights to make an archival copy, and could tell a user when these paragraphs fit a particular model (i.e. the fairly common warning against reverse engineering). Perhaps it could detect the usual Microsoft, Sun or IBM type EULA clauses that many smaller software companies seem to have copied almost or entirely verbatum.
This would free up the user to concentrate on understanding the unusual clauses.
There are clauses that are almost invariably the same in use. Most EULAs have one that says in effect, "if part of this contract is unenforcable, that doesn't mean the rest of it is thrown out too.". Even in law, where apparently nothing goes without saying, that's such a standard legal principle in the U.S. that it would apply anyway, to anything contractual. Something that could find clauses like that one and display them in subdued font, while boldfacing the ones that look possibly to actually affect the cuatomer's rights, would be welcome.
There's also a particular clause I'd love to see it tackle. Ever read a EULA and run across a phrase such as "Some states do not allow these exemptions...". I'd love for some software to tell customers that their state specifically does or doesn't allow X. Even if it only indicated that the state had a ruling on X, and it was up to the user to find out what it was, it would helpful to know it existed.
Who is John Cabal?
The insurance industry has regulated itself in this regard, in that they have all agreed to make their policies readable. Perhaps the software industry needs to do the same?
Though I still ike what one guy suggested here recently, that anytime you encounter a EULA after making a purchase, write up a letter expressing your post-purchase terms, and send it to the company, mentioning that if they do not accept your agreement, they can retrieve the software themselves by bring a full refund to your home.
Here's Kentucky;s wording of it, similar to other states:
304.14-440 Policies to be readable -- Factors to be considered.
(1) All insurance policies subject to the provisions of KRS 304.14-420 to 304.14-450
shall be written in language easily readable and understandable by a person of
average intelligence and education.
(2) In determining whether a policy or contract is readable within the meaning of this
section the commissioner shall consider, at least, the following factors:
(a) The simplicity of the sentence structure and the shortness of the sentences
used;
(b) The extent to which commonly used and understood words are employed;
(c) The extent to which legal terms are avoided;
(d) The extent to which references to other sections or provisions of the contract
are minimized;
(e) The extent to which definitional provisions are incorporated in the text of the
policy or contract; and
(f) Any additional factors relevant to the readability or understandability of an
insurance policy or contract which the commissioner may prescribe by
regulation.
$8.95/mo web hosting
This was the notion behind P3P. Also see Agent: I dont think it means, what you think it means.
Abstract
As the deployment of computer agents that act on behalf of users grow, so do questions regarding the legitimacy and legal standing of computer based agreements. I note the use of the terms "agents" and "proxy" in the technical discipline and argue that a more explicit understanding of these terms is necessary to properly address the convergence of technical and legal issues related to electronic commerce. Unfortunately, much of the legal literature on the question of computer agency is preoccupied with concepts of intelligence, consideration, and intention within a computer program; this is because these concepts are found in law. However, these concepts are premature in a technical context -- regardless of hand-waiving about artificial intelligence. I provide a simple technical explanation of computer agents and proxies, as well as a brief etymology of those terms in the technical context. I conclude by pointing out some problems of making automated agreements on the Web in hopes that this small contribution will permit legal analysis to focus on pressing issues of the day.
That does nothing but alter the wording of EULAs when it detects the legalese. I seriously doubt any court would uphold them once that happens.
if your lawnmower frequently shoots flames at your crotch, you don't go purchase flame retardant shorts -- you get a new mower (or "borrow" your neighbor's)
"What is needed - desperately - is a law robot."
uhh, yeah, and maybe it should have frikkin' laser beams too.
what you have to do is ask "Why the hell are you trying to confuse me? What's your goal, and does it serve my needs as a consumer? Talk sense, ya eel-skinned pencil-necks!"
It's only a model.
Back when I went to law school, which admittedly was for a very brief period, contracts required a "meeting of the minds" in order to be enforcable. How could a software program that reads EULAs ever result in a meeting of the agreement parties' minds?
This cannot possibly work. Why not? Well, in order for it to work, it would need cooperation of software vendors, who would have to mark up their EULAs into a form it could understand.
Why would they do this?
In fact, specifically, I believe that most software vendors are concerned about the enforceability of click-through EULAs. If the EULA is never actually shown to the user, this would possibly make them less enforceable. Therefore they will not cooperate with such a system, at least until such unseen agreements are legally binding.
Ppth. Not like I care about them. I just wait until I'm drunk to install software.
...I reckong they're written that way to pad the pockets of as many lawyers as possible. You need a lawyer to write one and you nearly need a lawyer/law degree to understand one.
They're also written that way so that people just blank out and click next without knowing what draconian terms they are agreeing to.
I am NaN
In a perfect world, the amount of legaleze I need to agree on would have some relation wih the product. a 10 page contract, that requies in depth study and advanced knowledge of the law to fully understand, might be appropriate for a million dollar deal, but not for a 20$ piece of software from walmart.
of course I have no good idea how to enforce this.
a possibility would be to define certain standart conditions with descritive labels, that companies could use, like NO-WARRANTY, MUST-NOT-COPY, ONLY-NONCOMMERCIAL. then limit the additional legaleze to only a few paragraphs for "minor" purchases by law.
(this draft of a "solution" has numerous problems. still, what are your thougths?)
mistook the EULA for his favorite Rossini piece and clicked accept", will no longer be a valid excuse if one has installed a friggin robot. Hell, the chicken probably gets more out of reading one anyway.
Imagine the liability to the robot provider if the robot makes a mistake. I can see it now...
Eula robot EULA:
Robot or maker not responsible for errors.
Do you accept? Yes, No
Eula robot:
Preceeding EULA is legally innocuous.
Do you wish to accept? Yes, No.
What happens (legally speaking) when someone else, i.e. a sysadmin, clicks through a EULA? Are you bound by that EULA even though you never read it and therefore there was never a "meeting of the minds"?
Well, that is your ignorance shining through. I might think that programmers make code needlessly complex so that the average person can't understand them, but that doesn't mean it's true. I'm sure it is much more comforting to think they are intentionally making it difficult to understand, instead of that you are not competent enough to understand it.
I don't think this is the answer. The answer is rewriting the EULAs themselves.
I'm involved in law, and I've thought a lot about those millions of EULAs I've agreed to (and no doubt broken) throughout the years. I can not possibly see how these things could be enforceable. If you even try to read through them, they're no more than mumbo-jumbo.
I think we need to have straightforward EULAs stating our rights and responsibilities in clear bullet points. Now, don't get me wrong, I'm all for legalese. It is important in covering loopholes and every possible contingency. But the average person needs to be able to clearly see what their rights and responsibilities under a contract are.
I worry that the program suggested here will create problems and, perhaps, lawsuits, and take away from the real change needed.
"Please put down your EULA. You have twenty seconds to comply." ...[whiiiirrr]...
[RATTATTATTATTATTAT]
I wish lawyers would strive for accuracy instead of precision.
At the very least I want my browser (or other User Agents) to save a cryptosigned copy of the licenses in my own local database. As well as the privacy policies of every remote site with which I exchange info. Building on that audit trail a negotiation system so licenses can be autonegotiated to my personal preferences will be the icing on the cake. And make it as easy for us to take our businesss elsewhere as it is now to surf to another server whose SSL certificate is autodetected as valid. Distributing these choices to automated user software, rather than relying on trust of the vendors, puts the power where it belongs: in the hands of consumers.
--
make install -not war
Question. Can I read the Robolawyer's EULA with Robolawyer? Please?
But then if anything bad happens to the US Falwell will blame it on gay robot lawyers.
There is a EULA Virus that does similarly, but involuntarily and without the user's knowledge:
a 49
http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/rlucas/2004/10/02#
I think this would just start a new war like we have with SPAM today. Companies that wanted to write "bad" legal agreements would just reverse engineer the LegalBot rules and write clauses the LegalBot didn't filter on.
"Too bad if your D-A-T-A gets ER AS ED. We retain N.O L-I_a BILI TY."
the stupidest idea I've heard on Slashdot today.
And that's saying a lot.
Weird. I made a post to /. about this a year ago. I can't find it. My basic idea/suggestion was the same: legalese is overwhelming us and automated assistants would help. However, my solution was a little more P2P -- upload the checksum of a a legal contract to a centralized server, and on that server qualified people would enter summary bullet-points for each contract. Moderation would mod up the most accurate/easy-to-understand batch of bullet points. End-users would be able to view the bullet points right next to the contract or EULA. Overall, the idea was to build a simple system that kept a bit of data, and allowed moderation to separate the wheat from the chaff. The system would be simple to build, but would grow from community involvement. If you kept it cleanly client-server, you could have multiple GUIs. Web contracts/EULAs/privacy documents could have a brower bar or similar interface to get bullet points. Windows applications with click-through EULAs could be monitored by a small app that sits in the background and pops up some bullet points when an app starts for the first time. Linux & Mac clients could be developed to pull from the same resource.
My Greasemonkey scripts for Digg &
However the problem with stupid terms of service is becoming bigger and bigger. I always read the terms of service and I find that I cannot agree to many of them. I refused to use the websites of many well-known corporations because I found their terms abusive or imbalanced.
Examples:
all these examples are real. in my experience I have found that good terms of service can be found mostly (if not only) in small corps or startups. when a corp becomes bigger and stronger, their contracts tend to become more imbalanced (i.e. not taking care of you). In addition I have also abandoned listening to commercial music and watching cinema movies because I feel that the copyright industry don't take care of me. Instead, I prefer listening to Free music (check creativecommons.org) or not listening to anything. If I buy a commercial music CD it will be either because the band supports creativecommons or if it is classical music in cheap price.
The copyright industry (and very soon the software patents industry) does not produce quality music, good movies, educational books and culture. They produce copyrightable content even if it is useless or even harmful to society and our culture and makes money by selling copyright licenses i.e. you pay them for getting the "right" not to be sued by them for "infringement" later.
I decided to vote with my Euros and refuse to buy anything if I know that the corp does something I consider immoral. I demand that the products I buy must have been made by ethical persons and under ethical situations. I searched and found corps which support ethical business practices and local communities and I buy mostly from them.
However, although legal agreements should be read by humans, I do recognise that the most people who cannot read these agreements or are boring to do so, could benefit from some form of software alarm for abusive paragraphs in these agreements.
Instead of parsing English legales, why not make codes for things described?
For example:
001Y Free Personal Use allowed
002Y Resale allowed
002N Resale Not allowed
You get the idea ...
Then, this will just be like codes on QuickTax, or web site ratings: easy for a computer to understand and for users to select what they want.
Will the lawyers agree to this? Or will they want us to drown in the legalse on purpose?
2bits.com, Inc: Drupal, WordPress, and LAMP performance tuning.
...I've got a modicum of common sense and can make out what the gist of it is, however, a lot of people glaze over/don't understand/can't be bothered to understand due to verbosity, that was the point I was trying (badly) to make.
I might think that programmers make code needlessly complex so that the average person can't understand them
The difference is that the average person will probably never have to look at source code, whereas they will probably click through hundreds of EULA's if they ever own a computer.
I am NaN
What are these "clickthrough" things people are talking about? Occasionally when installing, a window pops up that is crammed full of tiny dots that look like a grey haze to me, but I can always make it go away by randomly clicking while banging on the letters E, S, and Y. I'm pretty sure it's just a bug that manifests itself over and over due to so many programs using the same installation software.
The Platform for Privacy Preferences is basically exactly what he is talking about - a browser based lawyer that makes sure that any site you accept cookies from has a privacy policy that is acceptable to you.
http://www.w3.org/P3P/
What the guy is describing in the article (yes, i did rtfa) is best implemented in a netnanny-like service that blocks out all the sites rated high on the bullshit scale. Hell, give me the porn I _asked_ for, not this dickgirl crap.
"Oh No! Not again! Have pity! Have Mercy!"
Starbucks, Harbuckle of Breath.
As the initiator of the transaction, setting the terms is your prerogative. Most transactions start on the web these days, so configure your browser to set a custom header or change the User-Agent string to whatever you want.
Here's a suggestion:
HTTP-Request-Agreement: Any response to this HTTP request constitutes acceptance of all following terms: Any information you provide in response to any HTTP request is freely redistributable by anyone for any reason at any time, past or future. Anything I buy from you is mine to use as I wish. Any past or future license agreements between us are void. You will immediately deliver anything of value earned through the use of information about any person, to that person, at your own expense. You will not communicate with or give money to any lawyer or government agent for any reason except to pay them as required by the previous term. Any dispute between us will be resolved by an arbitrator of my choice at your expense. Arbitration is binding. I may choose myself as arbitrator. I win. You lose. If you are dissatisfied with the results of arbitration, your remedies are limited to sobbing quietly about it in a darked room. This is the entire agreement between us and may not be amended or overridden by any other agreement. If you do not agree to the preceding terms, you must not respond to this request.
In Mozilla you can override your User-Agent string by adding the following to prefs.js:
user_pref("general.useragent.override", "HTTP-Request-Agreement: [your language here]");
One advantage of this approach is that the fact that they agree to the terms will likely be stored in their webserver logs, to make it easy for them to verify that they did indeed agree. You can use your own HTTP proxy and log headers for your own records too.
------DO NOT WRITE BELOW THIS LINE------
Companies will put all kinds of nasty stuff in their eula's. I as a consumer have no ability to influence these sociopathic corporations and their one sided enslaving agreements. Software that let me set what general terms and conditions I agree with and automatically matches this set against the set of terms and conditions that a company has set for use of their software is the perfect answer. When legal and sales departments start receiving monthly status reports identifing how many clients they lost as a result of any particular legal clause, I expect some inter-departmental fights to develop. ;) The net result, legal contracts that preserve the rights of corporations and flex to public will.
Thank you so much! This is a great idea. I really hope someone picks it up and makes it real.
...for "fuck you"
Lawyers To Be Replaced With Perl Scripts
Update: Perl Script Gains Citizenship
If EULAs are legally binding, then there are several banks out there, who were stupid enough to fail to set the 'read only' property on their forms and failed to check the returned data, who owe me a couple of billion dollars and world peace.