Reading EULAs for fun and profit

EULAs (End User License Agreements) are ever increasingly long-winded, densely packed snoozefests of legalese which you see in your software that essentially is there so that the company to which you gave money for the product... can sue you if you don't use the product in the way they wanted. Or, conversely, when you go to sue them, they can point to the fact that you read the EULA and then by installing the product implicitly agreed to waive all rights to sue said company.

And in either case if it makes it to court that doesn't help too much either way since that will get overruled in many cases.

Perhaps that is why for the most part, people just don't read those things at all. Or perhaps it is because we are all a bunch of lazy morons and when we see a lot of words on the screen, we glaze over and look for something to click on to make it go away.

In fact, I have probably written enough in this post to already lose many people by this point. But those people will miss out on the point of all of this - a company put a clause in their EULA which resulted in a user getting $1000 for reading it. Essentially the company wanted to point out that if people actually paid more attention to what they were installing, they might avoid some of the spyware which gets installed on their systems.

While I think it is an awesome idea, I think it is giving users far too much credit. I am a systems manager at work and these people just flail wildly on their keyboards and mice, no clue at all what they are doing but they like the way the screen flashes when they do it. And that is at work - at home I imagine it is just an orgy of spyware and viruses all mixed in with a huge helping of penis enlargement pills and Nigerian princes.
Fun contests or not, if you want people to install your software and agree to anything at all, just put it in dense text and give a button for easy exit which allows them to avoid reading - and you are home free to install whatever you want.

Posted by Eric at February 23, 2005 11:06 PM | TrackBack