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Adobe EULA Demands 7000 Years a Day From Humankind
oyenamit writes "When was the last time you actually read and understood the EULA before installing a software? Never? You are not in a club of one. Unless you are a legal eagle, it would be almost impossible to fully understand what you are agreeing to.
Consider this: The Adobe Flash installer has a EULA that is 3500 words long. Adobe claims that the software is downloaded eight million times a day. If each person takes 10 minutes to read (and understand!) the entire text, they would consume over 1,522 years in just one day. If we put that into man-hours: an 8hr day, 240 working days in a year, that becomes 6944 years in a day. Turn that into a 50-year working life and that's 138 lifetimes a day! The Register deconstructs the text that we all blindly agree to by clicking the 'I have read and understood the...' checkbox." Also, never operate a GPS device in a moving vehicle.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Word_count#In_fiction
OK, so about ten years ago before my kids were old enough to enter into contracts, I simply had them install my software for me, meaning that no one read and understood the EULA. How are these abominations in any way enforceable??
Free Martian Whores!
If 1000 people each spend 5 minutes reading TFS, skimming the comments, and trolling a little here and there, that's 3.17 days *demanded* PER article! A dozen articles a day, and that's like a zillion DAYS A DAY!
Hyperbole much?
and then again how long are US bills and laws?
If 1000 people each spend 5 minutes reading TFS, skimming the comments, and trolling a little here and there, that's 3.17 days *demanded* PER article! A dozen articles a day, and that's like a zillion DAYS A DAY!
That's nothing! Have you seen any of my book reviews? Between Bennett Haselton and myself we're destroying English speaking civilization one inane wall of text at a time. Muahahahaha!
My work here is dung.
" The more I think about it, Old Billy was right ...
-- The Eagles
Well, is there any point in reading a EULA or any other online agreement? Seems like every one I've even skimmed has a provision that the agreement can be unilaterally changed -- by the company, not the consumer -- at any time simply by posting a new version somewhere. It's the consumer's responsibility, according to the agreement, to periodically check back and diff the two versions to see if there's something added/deleted/changed. So you might as well click, because even if you are OK with the terms, they can change at any time. Read it or not, the agreement you virtually signed today can be something different tomorrow. The one you read is only valid for the time it takes you to read it.
I am not a crackpot.
that's 138 lifetimes a day!
Er, right. Is that a lot? It could have been anything and I would have failed to be surprised, since I had no prior impressions on the subject. Telling us that a human's blood vessels would stretch to the moon and back (or whatever it really is) is interesting and surprising because we know how big a space they're usually crammed into. This is just numbers.
systemd is Roko's Basilisk.
I think you are onto something here. Clearly, we have to introduce gripping story-lines into EULAs to make them into a new art form worthy of taking the time to read:
"Adobe products are not sold; rather, copies of Adobe products, including Macromedia branded products, are licensed all the way through the distribution channel to the end user," Samantha said, stripping off her blouse. A voice echoed back to her through the open window on the street below, "UNLESS YOU HAVE ANOTHER AGREEMENT DIRECTLY WITH ADOBE THAT CONTROLS AND ALTERS YOUR USE OR DISTRIBUTION OF THE ADOBE PRODUCTS, THE TERMS AND CONDITIONS OF THE APPLICABLE LICENSE AGREEMENTS BELOW APPLY TO YOU." She gasped and lunged for the pistol.
___
Big apple, new Yorik, undig it, something's unrotting in Edenmark.
It doesn't work the way you think it does.
Everybody could take the time to read all of the inane rambling bullshit that timothy clutters the front page with. Then we'd really be wasting time.
In other news, if you buy a $1 candy bar every Sunday, that's $52 a year! But wait, there's more. If everybody in Detroit, MI bought a candy bar every Sunday, that would be $36,742,420 a year! And if they bought THREE candy bars, then OMG! That's $110,227,260 per year! And OH EM GEE, IF THEY PAID 7% SALES TAX THAT WOULD BE $7,715,908.20 IN TAXES A YEAR FROM CANDY BARS!
ERMAHGERD, NERMBERS!
I click, because if I am ever sued over an EULA, I will demand a jury. And demand that the jury read the EULA. I will then provide them an updated EULA before the trial is over. And demand they read that as well. If I feel the jury is still, not convinced of the fact that EULAs should be non-enforceable. I will provide a third update.
If I lose my case, then I know this world is so utterly insane....that what I do doesn't really matter. And I will ensure the publisher of the EULA is eradicated from this insane holo-simulation.
The article then goes to use some creative math to imply that it must be virtually impossible to accomplish by assuming it takes 10 minutes to read, multiplying that by 8 million downloads per day, and then converting that to years, saying that it works out to 1522 years
However... this is wrong.
It's bad math. Bad in the sense that it ignored significant figures, and bad as anyone who respects dimensional analysis can affirm.
10 minutes to read the EULA multiplied by 80 million users per day simply equals 80 million user-minutes per day.
The number of minutes per year can be easily calculated by multipying 60 times 24 times 365.25 = 525,960 minutes per year.
If we divide 80,000,000 user-minutes per day by 525,960 minutes per year, the result is in man-years per day, and is roughly 152.1. This figure is a full order of magnitude less than the figure they claimed. It's obvious that they slipped up on a decimal point somewhere.
However... 152.1 man-years is not the same thing as 152.1 years. And since that's still being split across 8 million people, it ends up still coming out to that same old 10 minutes per person. Many of them would simply have to be happening simultaneously, of course.
Again, however, I'm not suggesting that many people actually read the EULA or even that most people read it... only pointing out that the apparent absurdity that it could not reasonably happen is actually a deduction based on a fallacy. 80 million minutes works out to This sounds like a lot... but remember, again... that's split across 8 million people, so each one of them would still only take 10 minutes to read it.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
8 million a day seems a little absurd.
There are only 7 billion people on the planet, and the vast majority of them don't dwell on the internet.
For those who do, I'd guess that they watch a youtube video once and voila, they don't need to install flash again*.
*Then again, it does seem like adobe patches air, pdf, and flash 600 times/day (for functionally the same bloody software that's been installed for 10 years...), so maybe the math DOES work out.
-Styopa
I wish this would go ahead and get popular, work, or be useful: http://tos-dr.info/
Imagine if you weren't allowed to use roads because a bus company complained about your driving 3 times. --skunkpussy
OMG! Imagine how many years have been wasted to like, fucking Atlas Shrugged man.. If everyone who read it took like, 30 hours to read it that'd be like, a million years in wasted man hours. Whaooo...
It reminds me of those anti piracy studies that take some figure out of their ass, multiply it by the number of downloads of Rihanna albums on a few BT trackers and then claims that's what they've lost in revenue this year.
Would it be possible to make a human-readable short summary of the core idea of the particular EULA, followed by the actual text?
For example: "By accepting these terms, you agree not to disassemble, modify or redistribute this software. It is provided to you as is, without any warranty. For details, the complete end user agreement follows."
There is also the notion that an EULA bears only explicit agreement from one party, which generally isn't enough to call it a true contract in writing. A unilaterally binding agreement is not really a contract in the strictest sense. When combined with the actual act of purchasing, one could try to argue that the entire transaction (that concludes with the agreement to the EULA) constitutes some form of contract, but I doubt that in a legal sense that would be held up as a broad interpretation of the contract concept.
I know of at least one situation where a contractor had a customer sign his agreement that stated that the customer would pay a certain amount for work listed on the agreement. There was a dispute over the work, the agreement was brought into evidence, and rendered invalid as a contract because (1) the customer never got a copy of the agreement he signed, and (2) the agreement did not contain a signature of the contractor or representative.
I read through the iTunes EULA and gave it a good think. Then when I returned to my computer to press "I agree" it told me my session timed out.
I could start again, but how can I be sure that the EULA didn't change?
I wrote Steve Jobs (when he was alive), asking how it could be legally binding if it was impossible to read and click on?
No response.