EULAs – A solution at last?

Disagreements aren’t what you’d call an endangered species in most tech circles. In one realm however, it seems that everyone is more or less in accord: End-User License Agreements (or EULAs) are out of control. They’re too long, too hard to read, and to the average Joe, about as relevant to everyday life as Homer’s Odyssey.

EULAs became important to P2P users when it became known that Kazaa buried a clause in its agreement giving it the right to enable a distributed computing network among all its users. From there, most popular P2P programs began to install spyware and other forms of advertising alongside their own wares. Notice of these extras is typically buried in legal-speak somewhere in the EULA.

Now, a group called Clearware.org thinks they have the answer. Building from the Creative Commons licensing platform, Clearware.org provides a way for software vendors to state the important aspects of their EULAs in supple, human terms. The “About” section on the group’s homepage says “Clearware.org guides software vendors and service providers on how to describe and represent the terms and conditions of license agreements in a friendlier way to improve consumer awareness on issues that impact control over the user’s experience, privacy and system security.”

Specifically, it breaks down something like this. Let’s enter a hypothetical world and say that you install Kazaa, and along with it, Claria PersonalWeb. Upon install, you would see a simple document with big, bold text calling your attention to the most substantial aspects of the EULA. Rather than having to thumb through 40+ pages of jargon, you will see simply “You agree to the following: Display advertising, collect usage information, installs other software, etc.” If you want to read the full language pertinent to any of the “big stuff”, you will be guided to the relevant text in the EULA itself.

I’ve wanted to see something like this for a long time. When anti-spyware was my specialty back in 2004, my Mother contracted me out to her friends at work to have me pluck the most insidious malware from their computers. I worked on 50-60 systems over the course of a few months. Invariably, her co-worker’s kids had installed one or more P2P wares that opened the floodgates. Neither they nor their parents had bothered to read the EULA. In many cases, the EULAs provided for not only the ad support, but the right of the ad support technology to install more partner software after the fact.

Clearware.org also bridges a profound legal gap. Tedious and dry though they may be, EULAs are legally binding contracts on the web. Absent a very egrigious provision, a judge doesn’t want to hear that the contract was “too long” and it becomes childish to absolve grown adults of responsibility for knowing what they’re agreeing to. With a framework like this, there’ll be no excuse for installing shady software.

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