I have been thinking about licenses lately, and weather or not they hold any legal grounding. Even more because of the people (myself included) who always click right through the license agreements. So, I came up with idea:
Someone writes, say, a network application, and in a very long EULA, includes statements that allows the software writer to, at any time, access and read any files off of the computer... or worse even, format the hard drive of the user. Unsuspecting user that thinks this piece of software will work great in the office, and automatically clicks through the EULA. Now the users computer gets thrashed or somthing like that. Company that the user works for tries to sue the developer, but wait... there is that clause in the EULA that supposedly permits this.
So the result would be that either the courts would have to rule that EULAs are not legal documents, and we can get on living, or that the EULA is a legal document, and its too bad for the company and the worker that installed the software.
Slashdot Mirror
I have been thinking about licenses lately, and weather or not they hold any legal grounding. Even more because of the people (myself included) who always click right through the license agreements. So, I came up with idea:
Someone writes, say, a network application, and in a very long EULA, includes statements that allows the software writer to, at any time, access and read any files off of the computer... or worse even, format the hard drive of the user. Unsuspecting user that thinks this piece of software will work great in the office, and automatically clicks through the EULA. Now the users computer gets thrashed or somthing like that. Company that the user works for tries to sue the developer, but wait... there is that clause in the EULA that supposedly permits this.
So the result would be that either the courts would have to rule that EULAs are not legal documents, and we can get on living, or that the EULA is a legal document, and its too bad for the company and the worker that installed the software.
What do you think?