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Software vendors forcing unfair licences on users
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NEWS
Consumers are being forced to accept software licence agreements full of confusing jargon that are unfairly biased in favour of the vendors.
Of 25 software packages surveyed by the National Consumer Council (NCC), 14 had no mention in their packaging that the user must accept a licence agreement before the software can be installed.
The NCC's Whose licence is it anyway? report examined how licence agreements work in practice and found they are often full of jargon, making them hard for users to understand.
Many licence agreements are also presented in hard-to-read formats that discourage people from reading them.
The NCC also said it's concerned that many software producers have licence terms that protect their interests over those of the end user.
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Some of these terms include immediate contract-termination rights for the provider, restrictions on transferring user rights to a third party and legal uncertainty around references to foreign legislation.
The NCC says this means licence agreements are more like legal mandates than real options for the consumer.
The software the NCC surveyed included Adobe Photoshop CS2, Apple iLife 06, GSP AA Route Planner and Microsoft Office 2004 for Mac.
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Talkback
The reality is that the licence (EULA) keeps altering, when significant changes/updates/patches are installed and the end users at the desktop level end up being your "commercial acceptors", with often no legal qualifications or understanding of what they are accepting, on behalf of the organisation. The folks at PCProfile.com have been keeping an eye on EULAs for years and have seen this as an ever increasing trend, with some worrying "after market" inclusions such as the ability to audit PCs for licence compliance being slipped under the radar along with telemetry data flowing back after updates etc. Audit conditions are in more EULAs than people would care to admit.
It's time the EULA's (licenses) were dumbed down into plain simple language that was easy to read and understand.
All the license really needs to say is that its a one licence per PC approach and that reverse engineering of the code etc is not permitted. Backup copies are allowed, for the purposes of system recovery and all the other wordage is absolute and utter dross.
In this case the license can shrink to 1 page.