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Login Code of Conduct Found Not Binding
SurturZ writes "The Industrial Relations Commission of New South Wales, Australia, has ordered a company to reinstate an employee who downloaded porn onto a work laptop, even though it was in contravention of his workplace's code of conduct.
From the article:
the IRC said there was an 'air of automatically' about the annual signing off of employees on NCR's code of conduct, 'a degree of mechanical, unthinking routine in employees making a commitment to abide by the code.'" So, I think most of us can agree, porn at work == bad, but recognition that Click EULAs/other agreements are not binding is probably good. The question is — what replaces them?
Having read the article, it sounds to me that he got in trouble for downloading porn on the laptop issued to him by work, not necessarily at work. I know several people who have laptops assigned to them by their employers that they take everywhere - some don't even have their own computer at home. My guess is that he was using the laptop to download porn off the clock (possibly at home), but when word got out, the employer sacked him for misusing their laptop. I'm not going into whether or not he should have been doing this, or whether the employer had a right to fire him, I'm just stating that it doesn't sound to me like he was downloading porn at work.
The GPL is not a Terms of Service document or a EULA. It is not a license to *use* anything. It is a license to *redistribute* the software that it covers. You don't have to agree to it, in fact "agreeing to the GPL" is not even a meaningful statement. But you do have to abide by it if you want to redistribute, because nothing besides the GPL could give you a right to do so. This is why it bugs the heck out of me when companies pop up the GPL as a click-through license. It's asinine and shows a complete lack of understanding of what it even is.