Comment by d1zzy
7 years ago
Yes, EULA is a contract and has been successfully tested in court against reverse engineering: https://www.eff.org/cases/blizzard-v-bnetd
7 years ago
Yes, EULA is a contract and has been successfully tested in court against reverse engineering: https://www.eff.org/cases/blizzard-v-bnetd
For the contract portion of the EULA to be enforceable, you have to get the user to explicitly and willingly agree to it.
Tricking the user with a shrink-wrap license ("by opening this package you have agreed...") would not hold in court.
Asking users to click "I Agree" in installers also has dubious value due to the widespread practice of clicking these buttons to proceed without really reading the contract; their true intention was proceeding to the next question rather than entering any agreement.
In other words: if most reasonable persons wouldn't expect to be actually bound to the conditions listed in the contract, then Microsoft cannot effectively enforce them in a court.
> Tricking the user with a shrink-wrap license ("by opening this package you have agreed...") would not hold in court.
Your claims are legally dubious at best. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shrink_wrap_contract
“One line of cases follows ProCD v. Zeidenberg which held such contracts enforceable (see, e.g., Bowers v. Baystate Technologies[2]) and the other follows Klocek v. Gateway, Inc., which found the contracts at hand unenforceable (e.g., Specht v. Netscape Communications Corp.[3]), but did not comment on shrink wrap contracts as a whole.”
Couldn't that trivially be defeated by having that part of the work done somewhere that doesn't accept such shrink wrap contracts? Alternatively even just a different person than actually paid for it?
If I receive a box in the mail or an exe in an email along with a request to document it to what degree am I party to any contract with the developer? I received after all nothing from them.