I am waiting for the first corporation/Enterprise to challenge the EULAs in court.

It seems I am not alone in becoming more and more cynical the older I get.

Seems we don’t own anything we buy these days ! lol

Excellent piece.  The one condition that many of these have that you failed to mention – “We may change the agreement at any time in any way and you automatically agree to the changes”.

I read this agreement 5 years ago when win10 came out, and decided I was having none of it. I “borrow” the OS as part of my employment, and support others that do the same, as I have  my entire career, which is fortunately winding down. I started learning and installing Linux for friends when win10 came out. I’ve still got two win7 machines at home, no updates installed since the great get win X debacle. Bought a new laptop for home use recently, installed Linux Mint and am thrilled with it.

In a a year or two, I’ll be saying goodby to windows for good. Except for helping the occasional unfortunate friend still borrowing Microsoft’s property. And hacking the registry of MY dual boot win10 play PC at home, come get me M$.

You left off the “Click here to agree” button at the end of your article.

A similar big beastie which also uses impenetrable EUAs is unlikely to rock the boat by challenging one in court. However, I could see a regulator launching a legal case (eg the EU) or simply by-passing it altogether by legislation. Then there would be some kind of stand-off such as the Australian case for news feeds. It would have to result in compromise or the company would lose a huge market and/or the regulator’s jurisdiction would lose IT services.

The agreement, as described in detail in this well-written article in the Newsletter, strikes me as what is these days pretty much the standard for agreements on many different things, at least in the US of A, from renting an apartment to buying and installing software. I would think that is not just MS that has to change its tune, but many other businesses as well. As I see it, MS is just going along with the overall, and seemingly unstoppable, drift to totally irresponsible and liability-free business deals between those with the power to impose them and those often powerless to say no, but that either take the deal with both hands, for example by clicking “accept”, or by signing on the dotted line, or else go without; I am referring here to those who, generally speaking, now days are described as “users”, or “consumers.” (That also used to be known as “citizens”, as some of us might still remember, because that was such a long time ago.)

The most insulting restriction is that arbitration will take place before a judge selected by the writer of the “agreement”.

In Re: Click here to agree

The last Section of your Article is:
= = = = = = = = =
Final thoughts

There is some question as to the extent to which one-sided “click to accept” agreements can be enforced. On the off chance that they are enforceable, though, by reading this sentence you agree to wash and wax my car. Email me to select a convenient time.
= = = = = = = = = =

Mr. Oppenheimer, Sir:
You omitted (unintentionally, I understand) to include your email address, so I am reduced to contacting you via this public forum.

I will be delighted to wash and wax your car. Please drive it to my house; I am in the vicinity of Los Angeles, CA. The only opening that I have available this week for this service is this Thursday, 26 May. I hope that 11:22 AM is convenient for you. If you can make it, please let me know and I’ll give you my exact address.

/s/ PaulK

Filed at AskWoody.com – May 24, 2021 – 5:10 PM PDT

For your further information and dead serious amusement:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/End-user_license_agreement

Excerpts:

” Several companies have parodied this belief that users do not read the end-user-license agreements by adding unusual clauses, knowing that few users will ever read them. As an April Fool’s Day joke, Gamestation added a clause stating that users who placed an order on April 1, 2010 agreed to irrevocably give their soul to the company, which 7,500 users agreed to. Although there was a checkbox to exempt out of the “immortal soul” clause, few users checked it and thus Gamestation concluded that 88% of their users did not read the agreement. The program PC Pitstop included a clause in their end-user license agreement stating that anybody who read the clause and contacted the company would receive a monetary reward, but it took four months and over 3,000 software downloads before anybody collected it. During the installation of version 4 of the Advanced Query Tool the installer measured the elapsed time between the appearance and the acceptance of the end-user license agreements to calculate the average reading speed. If the agreements were accepted fast enough a dialog window “congratulated” the users to their absurdly high reading speed of several hundred words per second. South Park parodied this in the episode “HumancentiPad”, where Kyle had neglected to read the terms of service for his last iTunes update and therefore inadvertently agreed to have Apple employees experiment upon him. ”

” In a 2019 article published by Kevin Litman-Navarro for The New York Times, titled “We Read 150 Privacy Policies. They Were an Incomprehensible Disaster”, the complexity of 150 terms from popular sites like Facebook, Airbnb, etc. were analyzed and comprehended. As a result, for example, the majority of licenses require college or higher-level degrees: “To be successful in college, people need to understand texts with a score of 1300. People in the professions, like doctors and lawyers, should be able to understand materials with scores of 1440, while ninth graders should understand texts that score above 1050 to be on track for college or a career by the time they graduate. Many privacy policies exceed these standards“

Personally, I fully expect to find, in some EULA, some day,

“We reserve the right to enter your house at 4 AM and harvest a vital organ for sale on the black market.”

Hey, it may not be that far away.

In the meantime, the Bureau of Consumer Protection under the Federal Trade Commission has proved to be ineffective, feeble and weak since it was created…so don’t look to them. The only thing I know is to get the $$ out of politics…and we know when THAT’S going to happen. <sigh>

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Max,

Thanks for your delightful article. It was fun to read and wonderfully tongue in cheek. I plead guilty to rarely reading the blasted things and, when I do, skimming through them pretty quickly.

Your article also made me want to “de-legalize” the one we have on our site even further … and that’s a good thing.

Linda

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…and one last thing, very important:

No matter what the EULA says you’re agreeing to, if it is contradicted by State or Federal laws and/or constitutional rights, they are null and void. Period. You cannot sign away your State or Federal rights.

As such, a lot of “contracts”, “agreements”, and NDA’s are not worth the paper they’re on. I remember Melvin Belli expounding on this many decades ago, even though he was chiefly a Torts lawyer.

Changing focus slightly, do you think American Airlines, or Delta, or any other airline “agrees to hold the vendor harmless from whatever problems may occur from the use of their software? H*** no. (BTW, outfits in Aerospace usually have their OWN OS running the ship.)

Maybe it’s time some of this EULA nonsense we’re “agreeing to” needs to be challenged in a court of law, even if it’s consumer-grade. I wonder what the software agreement on farm equipment says…”…in case the machine goes nuts, and wreaks bodily mayhem, devouring your livestock and workers, you agree to hold us harmless…”

Anyone know? Some farm machinery is very heavily software-driven these days.