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Don't Like EULAs? Get Your Cat To Agree To Them
An anonymous reader writes "Anne Loucks built a device which, when her cat steps on it, can click the 'I Agree' button of a EULA. Who knows what the lawyers will make of this sort of madness. Can a cat make a legal agreement? Does it need to be of legal age? She lures the cat onto the device, and the cat steps on it of its own free will. Anyway, folks who hate EULAs now have another tool to make the lawyers freak out."
There are plenty of cases in which EULAs have been enforced so you should probably stop spreading this crap. The only portions of them that have been struck down are those provisions that wouldn't be allowed in any contract.
Contracts without signatures are commonplace and legally accepted as enforceable today - I haven't physically signed a contract or agreement for a mobile phone, bank loan, credit card or overdraft in 5 or 6 years, its all been 'I accept' on a web page. Tell the banks that those aren't legally enforcable and you will get laughed at.
There are others but this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ProCD_v._Zeidenberg is the landmark case. There is also a Gateway case that upheld the EULA.
I'm pretty sure that, no matter what, you can't authorize anything other than another human adult to act on your behalf.
At the same time, if she's luring it there with bits of food or whatever, then that's (in my mind) her effectively agreeing to it. Now, if she set this thing up, and the cat just happened to walk on it at some point, I could maybe see that, but I don't know that a judge would see it that way.
You're confusing two things...
You can only authorize another adult to act on your behalf as your agent.
You can utilize as an instrument anything, animate or inanimate, including a pen, a knife, a cat, or another person. I cannot claim my pen signed the contract, my knife stabbed you, my cat clicked the EULA, or Bob committed a battery on you when I shoved him into you against his will, and that I am thus responsible for none of the above: all of them are instruments of my will to cause that action. As I intended the action, the instrumentality is irrelevant.
Rather than moderate, I'll point out that it was $50,000 rather than $100.
Res publica non dominetur
Erm ... that's not even close to what Lucy was about. Lucy had little to do with intoxication. Straight from the op. Ct., "In was in fact conceded by defendants' counsel in oral argument that under the evidence Zehmer was not too drunk to make a valid contract."
Lucy revolved around whether the contract was valid based on "outward expression" rather than secret intent. Zehmer claimed he was "joking", despite talking for months about it, despite writing it down, despite getting his wife to co-sign it. The Court found that Lucy entered into the contract in good faith. If this contract weren't valid, how could any reasonable person want to enter into a contract ever without mind-reading capabilities?
And that's why Lucy is taught in every contract law intro class.