[Free-sklyarov-uk] MS right-to-crack EULA

[Edward Welbourne]

Dear Miriam, 

that was beautiful.

Did you notice how they said `this restricts your access' and then said
`here is how to by-pass the so-called copy-protection mechanism' ?

There's a clear anti-trust case against allowing the provider of a
digital access restriction (a.k.a. DRM) to provide (generally, and
without the consent of content-providers who may have relied on the DRM)
the means to by-pass it, at least in the presence of DMCA-oid laws which
make it a criminal offence for anyone else to do *exactly the same*.
Ergo, one of the following holds:

 * the help file is a `publication of instructions for how to circumvent
   a copy-proection mechanism', making MS guilty under DMCA,
 * the DRM isn't a copy-protection system, or
 * there's an easy anti-trust case.

(not that the boot-loader restrictions aren't one already)

> strangely i can find the license agreement for v.6.0 but not 7.x on
> microsoft.com
yes, that is strange.
What's strange is that you can find the 6.0 surrender terms.

Some time ago, I worked for a business whose product inter-operated with
a relevant (but not competing) MS-product [sorry, contract law is ugly,
spot the unstatements throughout] and wanted to add, in the bit of our
product that helped our customer download the MS-product, a link to the
relevant surrender terms (a.k.a. EULA) on the MS website (alongside our
link to where to go to download the accursed piece of standards
abrogating vomit in question).  I used their site-search engine.  No
chance (well, obviously, lots of near-misses, but nothing resembling
what I wanted).  So I e-mailed their support bods - I mean, we were
encouraging folk to use their product, surely they'd want to help - but
never got an answer (well, I guess we *were* competing with them in the
sphere for which the (free as in beer, but most emphatically not so in
the other sense) product was a `complement', as recent posts have
described stuff) aside from an auto-response mail which waffled a lot
but from which extracted the knowledge that: you can call us on this
pay-per-minute 'phone number (on the other side of the Atlantic from
you) and we'll put you on hold for a while - we like our `revenue
streams' - before telling you that you can easily read the EULA, just
install the product, and no of course you can't put a copy on your
web-site for your customers to consult, that'd ruin the scam^W^W^W
abrogate our copyright in the EULA.

Then (well, you know how it goes, better late than never) I engaged my
brain.  If the customer knew what they were agreeing to before they
comitted to the product, they might balk.  Far better to have the
purchasing manager love the demo and tell their sysadmin to install the
`free' product - with any luck, the sysadmin'll just `accept' the
license ``agreement'' without bothering to tell the boss the price
(a.k.a. EULA); but even in such a case, the boss has already sung the
product's praises so richly to The Big Bosses that backing out is a
non-option (or `career limiting step' as one of my past managers
described a competitors' mistake, though I had to ask him to say it
again slowly so I could decode his U.S. accent).  Hmm, corporate
politics, being played by the marketing guys who want to rip off the
corporation.  So, anyway, the only place you'll ever be able to see the
surrender terms is at the moment when you `agree to' them.  If you
delegate (as *every* corporation does) the task to someone who doesn't
have the authority to bind you to the terms, the legal murk will be
glorious, and you won't even know the terms by which you're allegedly
bound.

Of course, there's an interesting lawsuit waiting in the wings here,
when someone notices that the temp who did the installation *did not
have* the authority to commit the corporation to *anything*, least of
all, say, abstinence from business critical activities
(e.g. reverse-engineering of competitors' products, publication of frank
reviews, publishing the web-sites of all paying customers including
those critical of Microsoft, ..., chose your EULA, spot the crazy
restrictions).  As such, though Microsoft can try suing the temp, the
corporation that's been abrogating the EULA can get away with merely
uninstalling the product ... ideal, particularly for the publishing
house which produces adverse reviews and hires temps to install
software.

	Eddy.
--
 _
( )  ascii ribbon against html email
 X
/ \