Some Fun with EULAs

Over at my other blog I recently did a bit about the Vista EULA, and as Vista was release a couple days ago we might get back to the topic for a bit.
The excellent Cory Doctorow gave me a neat idea in his latest piece, namely: take an unconscionable phrase from a license agreement, google it, and see how many companies use it and for what. I tried "you cannot, for any reason" and got a neat hit from ADT.com:

You may not, for any reason, distribute, modify, duplicate, transmit, reuse, re-post, or use the content of the Site for public or commercial purposes, including the text, images, audio, and video without ADT’S prior written consent.

I like how they star with "for any reason," but then tell you which reasons they mean later. This, of course, is because the fundamental protections of fair use in our copyright law allow you to do those nefarious things for certain reasons.

Doctorow pictures (and damn near inhabits) a world in which half of one's life is spent clicking on (or otherwise "implicitly accepting" -- heh) agreements that one will not do all sorts of things that heshe can ordinarily do in a free society.

The biggest ramifications are in the world of copyright (music, movies, software) for a simple reason that I never get tired of elucidating:
Those industries are based on an outdated economic system. It was once at-least-somewhat expensive to copy the basic elements of culture -- books, recording -- and the patterns of mathematical knowledge we call software. As this is no longer the case, the companies that rely on this being the case must now foist endless contracts on us, wherein we agree that it is the case or that we will act as though it is.

We will *not, for example, use Microsoft FrontPage "in connection with any site that disparages Microsoft, MSN, MSNBC, Expedia, or their products or services ... ". (src) Did you know that

And that was about 6 years ago. Think it's gotten better or worse since then?