Man Finds $1,000 Prize in EULA 446
bhtooefr writes "When Doug Heckman was installing a PC Pitstop program, he actually read the EULA. In it, he found a clause stating that he could get financial compensation if he e-mailed PC Pitstop. The result: a $1,000 check, and proof that people don't read EULAs (3,000 people before him didn't notice it). The goal of this was to prove that one should read all EULAs, so that one can see if an app is spyware if it is buried in the EULA."
No Kidding (Score:5, Insightful)
And the kicker is, players do talk about strange "bugs", even ask us to fix them, but none of them actually goes so far as to discover those eggs. Maybe they will now after reading this post
So I gather some of the 3000 users may have read the EULA but dismissed the possibility of real cash prize., just like not everybody entered suparmarket prize draw thinking that they won't be so lucky.
Er... (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:$1,000 for reading all the way through EULAs? (Score:5, Insightful)
True.
However a good rule of thumb is that if you cant understand the EULA, dont agree to it. I mean would you sign somthing you didn't understand?
Re:yea let's make society crazy (Score:5, Insightful)
Think of Rumplestiltskin, without the princess even knowing what her end of the deal is.
Nice "parable", but no great utility (Score:5, Insightful)
People will still not read an EULA because
(a) They know thay not every EULA has a $1000 check buried in it
(b) They still won't understand the real point to reading the EULA - which is understanding exactly what the software claims it will do on your computer.
Unless they get (b), there really is no reason to read an EULA.
Re:yea let's make society crazy (Score:3, Insightful)
I think the point they're making is that people don't read EULA's and in terms of research, the $1K prize was worth it for the PC Pitstop people to demonstrate that they could pretty much do anything they liked and have the user agreeing to all conditions as a precondition to use. The only real outs for the end user are 1) proving the eventual end user agreed (rather than it was all pre-installed stuff) 2) that EULA's hold any real legal weight, which some haven't.
Think of Rumplestiltskin, without the princess even knowing what her end of the deal is.
And yet the princess was pretty venal, expecting to take advantage of the little dude. Ain't no saints in that story.
Re:Yeah Right! (Score:1, Insightful)
Standardization of EULAs ? You mean like:
1. TYPE A EULA. Product made by company with a capital of over $$$. (real legalese, Microsoft as an example)
2. TYPE B EULA. Product made by company with a capital under $$$. (pseudolegalese due to 1. company overstretching to cover market or 2. company embellishing stuff to aim higher)
3. TYPE C EULA. Product made by small company, hungry for fast money and betting on user ignorance.
Let's get real. Maybe most companies would be able to respect the same conditions, but definitely they won't be able to respect the same terms. So much for the standards. I mean unless you're really ok with the Peoples' Bank of Burundi offering you the same form to fill as the Bank of America.
Reading ta uela all the way thru ? (Score:1, Insightful)
The problem is that a EULA is not *ment* to be understood by the "EU". If it was, it would not have been written by a language only advocates and the like *claim* they understand (but I'm, because of first-hand information, not all that sure about that either).
Even worse : EULA's legal in one country can be (largely) un-lawfull in another. But even when the (soft-)ware is adapted to the language of a country, the EULA remains the same : largely against the country's (the adaptation is done for) laws.
I ask you : is that to tell the "EU" what the can and cannot do, or is it just to put up a "you are not allowed to do anything" -smoke-screen ?
Non Personal (Score:3, Insightful)
Imagine if you follow somebody around for months and watch every move they make -- you can learn anything needed to advance whatever agenda you have in mind.
Not really the same at all (Score:3, Insightful)
An easter egg is a fair amount different than a prize offering burried deep in an EULA. People generally will find easter eggs 1 of 3 ways:
1) by searching specifically for an easter egg because they think there is one there for some reason
2) completely by accident
3) after being told exactly how to find it by someone else who found it through methods 1, 2 or
Finding a prize in an EULA is a little easier since people really should be reading legal contracts before signing them with the next button. Not very many people are just going to randomly search for easter eggs in software, since that's just a waste of time, and equally few people will investigate bugs fully enough to find an easter egg by mistake.
I don't want to have to read EULAs! (Score:5, Insightful)
This is not a goal I want to be moving towards.
I mean, I can go to home depot and buy a nail gun and a welding torch without having to read, parse, and agree to any complex and lengthy legal agreement. Why should I have to do this to buy and use software?
There ought to be a law (Score:4, Insightful)
Right, and those are called laws. Most of an EULA is already codified in various laws, and everything else is asking you to give up your rights.
If I buy a telephone at WalMart I don't have to sign an EULA. If I buy a softphone at WalMart they expect me to agree to an EULA. What's the difference?
If I buy a car, it comes with software in it, but they don't expect me to sign an EULA.
As far as I can tell, an EULA is saying that Chewbacca lives on Endor.
Re:$1,000 for reading all the way through EULAs? (Score:1, Insightful)
hmmm... I wonder if I could sue if taking the time to read the liability waiver had an adverse impact on my treatment...
Proof? (Score:3, Insightful)
Sounds like a great marketing idea.
1. Get a friend of yours to say they got $1000 from your software
2. Advertise the event on your website
3. Include a fair share of advertisements on page
4. Submit miracle story of how great EULA's are to slashdot
5. People flock to your website to see what it's all about
6. Profit
Even underpants gnomes can figure this one out. Until somebody does an indepth report on the story I'll consider it a ploy and move on.
Too many licenses (Score:2, Insightful)
But these commercial licenses - Jesus Christ they are long, they are complicated, they are in fine print, they are badly written, and they are all unique. It's like a fricking zork maze. Someone needs to figure out how much time it takes to read software licenses and add that to the "cost of ownership" that they report.
Re:Er... (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Steve Mann's Ouijagree (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Another reason why EULAs shouldn't be enforceab (Score:1, Insightful)
The New Software Purchase
1. Go to shop and enrich [bloated corporation name] by hundreds of hard-earned dollars.
2. Return home, open oversized box, remove numerous cardboard sleeves & other parts of trees that died in the cause of marketing and extract CD.
3. Run installer and get confronted with "Agree to this crap or Agree you have just blown hundreds of hard-earned dollars" (as retail store will refuse to accept return of opened software box).
Summary of Situation:
A EULA on screen is not worth the paper its written on, as it is coercive. It may not be as obvious as a 7-foot tall thug standing over you until you pay $50 for a beer in a seedy bar, but holding you to ransom with an "ok" button is still a form of duress.
Thus, any so-called "agreement" is not a freely-entered agreement at all, but consumer submission to what amounts to financial terrorism and corporate sophistry.
Yuck (Score:3, Insightful)
Of the things I want to do the LEAST in my life, reading EULAs ranks pretty high among things which do not cause physical pain or summering to my loved ones.
Fuck reading it. I am more likely to look a prog up on CNET. If it had a lot of thumbs-down, I read those and see what people complain about. People always complain about spyware if its there (and sometimes even if its not)
Doing a google or deja search for name of the program and spyware always brings up some discussion of that topic, which lets me know conclusively (well, as far as something can be conclusive on an internet thread) what the answer is.
Reading the actual EULA? If I am a billion dollar company about to bind something with my product, yea I'll read it. But for something I am installing at home, behind a firewall which will prevent it from phoning home, FUCK IT! Who cares what they wrote?
Re:No Kidding (Score:1, Insightful)
I only fucking say this in this manner in a hope that this instantly gets rated down.
Its well know that in certain fields, the only way you will ever get better is to do more. In this case, its writing more. Studies show that the more you write, even with random feedback that has nothing to do with your own writing will cause you to write better.
What else? It seems that even if graders only scan these works, its almost as effective as if they actually read them like a novel. My graders grade papers electronically, and unknown to them, I record such things as the time spent on each paper, scroll rates (some don't even scroll all the way to the bottom) and mouse positions (as a lot use this the way some of us use our fingers).
I've found the graders that simply scan the works generally are as accurate (or even more so) than those investing the time in it. Their feedback is just as valid. It turns out, most of these graders can see patterns before they see the details and these patterns are very easy to notice (I too see these without trying thse days).
So, does it matter if they read everything? Fuck no. It only matter than they got you to write these and gave just enough feedback to get you to concentrate on not making that particular error again (at least in the short run).
So all in all, your teacher is a much better educator that you even understand.
EULA length needs disclosure (Score:3, Insightful)
If I'm buying a new mousemat and it has a 20 page EULA, I'll decline the purchase, as the reading time outweighs the value of the product.
This means all products need the full EULA text printed on the outside of the packaging.
EULAs are bullshit that keep lawyers in sports cars, one reason my games don't have them.
Spyware Description in EULA Jibberish (Score:2, Insightful)
It's not as if they say somewhere in the text "This is Spyware".
You can't reasonably expect every 10 year old, grandmother, or even your boss at work to actually understand any of the technical mumbo jumbo that Spyware/Adware uses to describe itself. Most people do not understand what spyware/adware is, that it may be bad or how it would be described in a EULA.