BS: Have YOU read your EULA Today?

Subject: RE: BS: Have YOU read your EULA Today?
From: Richard Bridge
Date: 23 Mar 12 - 02:20 AM

I have occasionally compared "plain English" versions of provisions with the original "unnecessary legalese verbiage". I have never found them to have exactly the same meaning. I am currently dealing with a problem that arose in a conveyancing matter and getting any answer to what the legal position is is greatly hampered by the "simplified" conveyancing protocols leaving it largely unclear whether something someone said is (a) of no legal relevance (b) a misrepresentation (in law) (c) if a misrepresentation still actionable (d) a contract term (e) if a contract term no longer actionable as a result of (i) the doctrine of merger or (ii) a contract term.

Subject: RE: BS: Have YOU read your EULA Today?
From: JohnInKansas
Date: 23 Mar 12 - 12:29 AM

Don Firth -

Regarding some twenty-five years ago ..., I have some significant bit of experience with those "impenetrable governese boilerplate" documents, and can fully sympathize. While I can't say anything about the ones you worked with, the ones I was required to "finish" for particular uses for aircraft are quite similar, I'm sure.

It takes at least six years experience with them for a very bright writer who starts out with the technical skills to understand what is needed in the hardware and processing before it starts to become clear why they're written as they are, and what specific things each of the "required" parts of the boilerplate are supposed to accomplish. Once a "new writer" is assigned the actual writing of one, review by someone more experienced is a very good idea for a while, because it usually takes another five or six years of "practice writing" to learn how to coordinate with "procurement" and "purchasing" agents who have to "implement" the boilerplate so that their "deficiencies in skills" are accommodated, before anyone can know how to "get it all really right." Most organizations that try to use the "spec forms" have virtually no one "in control" with the needed understanding, so you get no help.

When EA (forcibly) transferred me to a program that was supposed to create a new airplane, the existing group had been given a year to select vendors and an additional year to get the "first parts" tested and approved. I arrived 27 months after the "kickoff" and was assigned seven moderately complex parts that management "forgot they needed." One of their "managers" had rewritten the standard boilerplate, and everyone had been ordered to use his "clarification."

Since I had previous acquaintance with the manager who did the rewrite, and knew that he was an idiot, I used the original "MIL-STD-..." boilerplate. They gave me two "young engineers" to assist, neither of whom had any applicable experience. There were approximately 30 other "groups" in the department essentially identical to mine, each responsible for about the same kinds of hardware, but all with (at least) a two year head start on us.

Aside from an immediate supervisor whose only skill was at "sucking up to higher management" my group had few real difficulties and two years after I arrived the airplane took off for its "first flight."

In part because I had used "the boilerplate" correctly (I think) my group was the only one of the thirty in the "hydraulics design department" having all our parts "on the airplane," doing what they were supposed to do, with all required testing completed, and all the paperwork done.

In the majority of cases I've seen, the boilerplate can work. But it ain't really easy. Much of what's in most such skeletons are there to tell everyone what to do about problems that "probably won't happen," but in every moderately complex program there will always be one or two that do happen, so the "plate" needs to cover them all.

The "boilerplate" we used mandates a minimum of 27 pages just to put all the required sections in the document, and even if it's just to add a "NOT APPLICABLE" for the section, the section should be there so that knowledgeable users will know where to find everything else. One of our devices took about 115 pages when all the "flesh" was added, but it happened to be the one where the "least common problem" popped up, and I would have had no way to solve it with the "clarified" form demanded by the resident idiot. It was easily solved because I could put my finger on the paragraph and say "it says here... ." I suspect "resident idiot" is the one most responsible for none of the other groups getting the job done, but the total absence of training - to explain why the boilerplate is there and what it's supposed to do - was the real problem; and there was no evidence anyone in "management" had a clue.

(That airplane is probably considered slightly obsolescent now, about 20 years later, although they still sell quite a few. One of my "young engineers" learned quite a bit, and may be still doing something useful - somewhere. The other never learned much but had good "brown lips" so he's probably still there, doing about the same.)

John

Subject: RE: BS: Have YOU read your EULA Today?
From: Richard Bridge
Date: 22 Mar 12 - 08:19 PM

No that is not all they say. I have drafted the sodding things, and I have amended them for commercial clients too.

Gnu, you are wrong. The English common law requirement is that the terms should have been brought to the attention of the reasonable man, not that he could read or understand them. Thompson -v- LMS [1930] 1KB 41 (Court of Appeal).

Subject: RE: BS: Have YOU read your EULA Today?
From: Bee-dubya-ell
Date: 22 Mar 12 - 08:00 PM

All most EULAs really needs to say is "I agree not to steal your code."

Subject: RE: BS: Have YOU read your EULA Today?
From: Don Firth
Date: 22 Mar 12 - 07:54 PM

Dunno about private industry, but some twenty-five years ago I was working as a technical writer for a government agency that was involved in residential weatherization. I got to looking through one of the "boilerplate" sections that we were supposed to write our reports around.

It was supposed to say something important if you were going to have some clue as to what the report was supposed to be about, but it was filled with governmentese, and it was downright opaque!

I didn't have anything on my desk at the time, so I took a whack at it, first, deciphering the bloody thing so I knew what it was trying to say. Once I got the damned thing sorted out, I settled down and rewrote it in plain, understandable English! And it said what it was supposed to say. And in the process, I managed to cut the wordage down from around 1,200 words to about 900.

I was bloody proud of myself!

I used it on the next report I submitted.

It came back like a ricochet, and I got my ass chewed for messing with it. Barbara Hickey ("Picky Hickey") upstairs admitted that it was much clearer, easier to read, and was clearly understandable.

But—it was a government document, and that's the way they wanted it.

And don't do it again!!

Don Firth

Subject: RE: BS: Have YOU read your EULA Today?
From: Bill D
Date: 22 Mar 12 - 07:26 PM

Ulysses is probably easier to sort out!

I wonder who gets paid to compose those documents?

Subject: RE: BS: Have YOU read your EULA Today?
From: Stilly River Sage
Date: 22 Mar 12 - 07:12 PM

Shakespeare is probably much easier to understand. :)

SRS

Subject: RE: BS: Have YOU read your EULA Today?
From: gnu
Date: 22 Mar 12 - 06:03 PM

Which means they can't do anything to you in a court of law. At least, not in British Common Law... because a "reasonable man" could not be expected to read all of it and understand all of it. It's a shakey defense but it is defendable based on reaonability.

Subject: BS: Have YOU read your EULA Today?
From: JohnInKansas
Date: 22 Mar 12 - 04:26 PM

PC Advisor reports an "analysis" of a few "Terms and Agreements" documents that people routinely click "Agree" on in order to install, join, share, participate, and otherwise "have fun." For software, the usual term is EULA (End User License Agreement) and it would fit in a thread title while "Terms and Agreements" was a little too long. I hope this won't be confusing.

Apple iTunes T&Cs 10% longer than Shakespeare's Macbeth reports that:

Apple iTunes T&Cs 10% longer than Shakespeare's Macbeth
Paypal's T&Cs are longer than Hamlet

By Simon Jary
PC Advisor
22 March 12

Some online, mobile and tech terms and conditions agreements are longer than plays by Shakespeare – with PayPal's T&Cs having a longer word count than Hamlet.

In a report from consumer association Which? Customer T&Cs were added up and compared to Shakespeare's most famous plays. The terms and conditions you have to sign to use Apple's iTunes is longer than Macbeth – which itself sounds like an Apple product.

The iTunes T&Cs – 2,456 words of privacy terms plus 17,516 of terms of use –adds up to 19,972 words, compared to Macbeth's 18,100.

Add in the T&Cs for iOS 5 and iCloud and the word count for Apple's privacy and terms of use reach a whopping 44,062 words – over half the length of Harry Potter And The Chamber of Secrets (84,799).

The word count of PayPal's T&Cs is a whopping 36,275, compared to Shakespeare's Hamlet at 30,066 words.

Facebook's 11,195 words in length – 6,910 words of privacy policy and 4,285 words of terms of use – is about the same length as Einstein's General Theory of Relativity.

Which? tots up all of Google's T&Cs (search, YouTube, Picasa, Chrome, Android, Google Wallet and Google Books) at 10,640 words – which it claims is the length of the average undergraduate dissertation.

Social network Twitter, which restricts users' tweets to a mere 140 characters, has T%Cs that add up to 4,445 words – about half the length of Roald Dahl's The Twits, says Which?.

The latest Apple iOS 5 update for iPhones weighs in at 13,366 – a lot to read on its small screen if downloaded directly on the device.

We await with dread the Terms and Conditions that outweigh Tolstoy's War And Peace at 587,287 words…

****

I've got news for them.

Those 3 of us who actually have attempted to read one of these documents will have noted the "inclusion by citation" of other "terms of use" that "protect the rights" of owners of software or other "things" used by the site or software for which the "up front" contract is applied.

When Adobe bought Macromedia, being thoroughly Pi**d with the shoddy maintenance of Macromedia, I downloaded the "Flash" P.O.S. from Adobe to take a look at why a reputable (up until then) bunch like Adobe would want to own it. I found about 14 additional EULAs "incorporated by citation" in the Adobe EULA, so I went to each of them, and found that every one of the "included by citation" agreements "included by citation" at least 5, and in one case 17, other agreements "included by citation."

Copying the original EULA and the additional EULAs "incorporated by citation" at the first level resulted in a document somewhat over 380 pages, so I cut back to copying only a link to each cited additional EULA in the "second tier" of "requirements incorporated by citation in requirements incorporated by citation." This got me slightly past 480 pages.

After that I backed out and followed only "three apparently important" lines of incorporations of incorporations, which got me to around 700 pages at "sixth tier," but with no end in sight.

I followed one string to 8 levels, and ended up with a total of 900 pages of "mostly links" - without copying the full text of any past the first two levels of "agreements."

Unfortunately, I didn't record a word count before I hit Delete and dumped the whole thing. A typical page in Word, as I generally make notes, runs close to 500 words, so I was probably at an equivalent of about 450,000 words recorded, mostly just in links to the actual words.

You can't read one of the %@#!$^ things to any visible end point. (At least that's my present assessment.)

You just have to click "agree" and hope their lawyers don't get annoyed by anything you might do.

John