Slashdot Mirror
Amazon Web Services Drops Controversial Patent Clause From Standard User Agreement (geekwire.com)
Amazon Web Services has quietly dropped a controversial provision from its user agreement that essentially forced customers to agree that they could never file a patent infringement lawsuit against the public cloud vendor. From a report: The clause in the basic user agreement raised a lot of eyebrows back in 2015 after AWS asserted it as a possible defense in a patent lawsuit filed by Appistry, a former AWS customer that sued the cloud vendor over high-performance computing patents. Until sometime around February 2017, Section 8.5 of the basic agreement for using AWS included this sentence: "During and after the Term, you will not assert, nor will you authorize, assist, or encourage any third party to assert, against us or any of our affiliates, customers, vendors, business partners, or licensors, any patent infringement or other intellectual property infringement claim regarding any Service Offerings you have used.
I actually prefer items like that remain in the agreements/EULA's etc as it makes them completely invalid and easy to argue in a court should you ever need to that they have created an illegal agreement that violates consumer rights and hence nothing in it can be enforced.
Software patents are immoral anyway so if you were ever in a position to use the patent clause then you deserved to die in a fire.
...that whole system came to be because of The Purge --termination of virtually the entire IT workforce in America during the 2000 stock market crash and subsequent homeland attacks. That was just as Indians were starting to show up offering their fine coding skills for $7/hr (to maintain their expiring H1Bs) and teens/near-teens who had just been making $50/hr in 1999 were willing (after having moved back home) to work for $10-$17/hr. The more experienced people were forced into retirement and couldn't possibly come back for those kind of wages. Absent ANYONE who knew what the hell they were doing, these teen-like and Indian people googled for recipes/howtos/each-other for rumors about how to make things work, much of it written by those in Europe who weren't as badly affected economically but also never had the kind of training that America's once great IT workforce had (because they depended upon America for such tedium --not because they were stupid). Amazon recognized the skills problem and opened up its in-house web-services to businesses everywhere and the rest is history. [It should have been IBM which had provided that kind of timesharing service to society decades earlier, but Those Greedy Bastards were *leaders* in sending hundreds of thousands of their people into retirement while opening up plant after plant in India and were no longer in a position, though they tried by fixing PHP (the 5.0 release) and embracing Linux and Java.] Amazon totally went gangster at the point where the business schools began preaching "the cloud", that is, "Nobody ever got fired for using Amazon Web Services". They can put anything they like in their contracts and you will accept it or they will cut you off.
You see, they also handle most startups (and suck the cash right out of them on the pretext that it reduces Total Cost of Operations) and are now actively bullying hold out companies that should know better. Never mind their global cascading S3 crash last Winter. I'm thinking it ends with the company being busted up into components that can't survive on their own because the only thing that makes money is the thing they CORNERED THE MARKET with: AWS.
should be made illegal. How is a user supposed to know what they are signed up to if the other party to the ''agreement'' can change part of, what is often, a long & badly written has been changed? Any change should be clearly flagged up and all users informed by email; this should be long enough before the change takes effect for them to move to an alternate service.
It was impossible to enforce anyway. What would would Amazon do if I sued them for patent violation anyway? Terminate my contract? Go ahead.