Roman Black wrote:
> Chris Hunter wrote:
>
>>If you read the M$ Licence Agreement (that you signed up to by tearing open
>>the packaging!), you'll discover that they've cleverly omitted to actually
>>offer ANY support, ever!
>
>
>
> Those agreements are not legal and won't stand the
> test of time. In a situation where 99% if the users
> NEVER read the "agreement" the user can't be held
> accountable. There are laws protecting the consumer
> from "agreeing" to documents they may be tricked
> into.

Changing to [OT]:

While I agree with you that this type of coerced contract is *usually*
not enforceable under Common Law, I'm pretty sure I just read recently
that at least one District Judge here in the U.S. upheld one of the
shrink-wrap EULA agreements in a case recently.  Of course, if Appealed,
this ruling could be tied up for years.

The legalality of software EULA's is ultimately something only Judge and
Jury will decide over time, but the momentum of precedent has started to
swing, and not in favor of the consumer.  Shrink-wrap and click-through
EULA's may yet be considered full-blown enforceable contracts.
Especially if no other method for negotiating a contract at
purchase-time is found for software vendors to use.

There's also the issue of someone having enough resources to fight it if
put to the test.  Our legal system here is becoming more expensive than
the average person can bear, especially against a Corporation with $2
Billion U.S. Dollars (with a B) available in their "war chest".

On the flip-side, older Microsoft EULA's had a "refund" clause in them
that if you had never used nor intended to use and had made no copies of
their software that came pre-installed on a PC, you could require that
they take it back and provide a refund of the value your PC manufacturer
paid for the software.  Of course, that clause was removed very quickly
from their shrink-wrap EULA, but not before a number of folks were able
to garnish refunds for large numbers of machines purchased with
Microsoft products installed that never had and never would have used
the products.

The bad news ultimately was that M$ revised their vendor rules and to
this day, even after the Justice Department lawsuit, they require their
vendors to not sell machines with no OS on them if they also provide
machines with Windows on them.  Dell Computer, of course, had the last
laugh when they started shipping machines with FreeDOS on them to meet
the requirement.

Fun to watch the battles of the Titans sometimes, isn't it?

Nate

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