Abusive "license agreements" dissected

By Cory Doctorow at 11:14 pm Sunday, Oct 23

TG Daily has a great piece collecting and mocking abusive clauses in end user license agreements (EULAs). The Slashdot discussion of the piece is also really good -- lots of humorous examples of egregious offenders, salted with a good discussion of what a contract is and isn't.

Some EULA clauses allow software manufacturers to monitor your machine at will - DRM being a good example - and send data back and forth at will. They can even download new content onto your machine without having to notify you - anything from an innocuous patch to full blown spyware.

For example take Section 6 of the Pinnacle Studio 9 movie-making EULA:

You acknowledge and agree that in order to protect the integrity of certain third party content, Pinnacle and/or its licensors may provide for Software security related updates that will be automatically downloaded and installed on your computer. Such security related updates may impair the Software (and any other software on your computer which specifically depends on the Software) including disabling your ability to copy and/or play 'secure' content, i.e. content protected by digital rights management.

Link (via /.)