Amazon Web Services Drops Controversial Patent Clause From Standard User Agreement

Amazon Web Services has quietly dropped a controversial provision from its user agreement that essentially forced customers to agree that they could never file a patent infringement lawsuit against the public cloud vendor. From a report: The clause in the basic user agreement raised a lot of eyebrows back in 2015 after AWS asserted it as a possible defense in a patent lawsuit filed by Appistry, a former AWS customer that sued the cloud vendor over high-performance computing patents. Until sometime around February 2017, Section 8.5 of the basic agreement for using AWS included this sentence: "During and after the Term, you will not assert, nor will you authorize, assist, or encourage any third party to assert, against us or any of our affiliates, customers, vendors, business partners, or licensors, any patent infringement or other intellectual property infringement claim regarding any Service Offerings you have used.

meh

[gravewax]

I actually prefer items like that remain in the agreements/EULA's etc as it makes them completely invalid and easy to argue in a court should you ever need to that they have created an illegal agreement that violates consumer rights and hence nothing in it can be enforced.

Re:

[knightghost]

Does it actually work that way? Is the entire civil contract thrown out on the smallest technicality?

Re:meh

[Asgard]

Almost every contract will have a 'severability' clause (http://www.contractology.com/severance-clause.html) that seeks to pre-jettison any portions that that are deemed illegal / unforceable while keeping the rest of the terms.

Re:

[gravewax]

that really is also a country by country thing and depends on who the contract is intended for and many such clauses have in the past also been ruled invalid.

Silent changing of User Agreement

[Alain Williams]

should be made illegal. How is a user supposed to know what they are signed up to if the other party to the ''agreement'' can change part of, what is often, a long & badly written has been changed? Any change should be clearly flagged up and all users informed by email; this should be long enough before the change takes effect for them to move to an alternate service.

Re:

[Solandri]

That's the drawback of paying month-to-month. If you sign up for a 5-, 10-, or even 30-year service contract, then you can negotiate the terms of that long-term contract. And when both parties have signed that contract, they can't change it for 5-, 10-, or 30-years without mutual consent.

What's that? You don't want to commit to a contract for that long? You want to be able to stop using the service at the end of the month if it no longer suits your needs? Well that works both ways. If the company o

Re:

[spire3661]

More importantly, these should be forced into a plain language format, that a average person can understand (that is who is intended for it to be enforced upon). If its too complex, it should be considered a void contract, as you cannot come to a 'meeting of the minds' if you require a lawyer for the simplest of modern interactions. The law is supposed to be accessible to everyone, its time to stop allowing these unconscionable contracts that are being offered.

Does not matter

[qbast]

It was impossible to enforce anyway. What would would Amazon do if I sued them for patent violation anyway? Terminate my contract? Go ahead.