Do rights go missing in the space between product and service?
End user license agreements (EULAs), and other contracts between consumers and vendors such as terms and conditions (T&Cs), privacy policies, and acceptable use policies, are a ubiquitous part of life online. We need to agree to a EULA, and often a privacy policy, every time we install a new product or sign up to an online service. It’s likely that all of us are currently bound by dozens – maybe hundreds – of these agreements at any given moment. But despite being governed by them, not many of us know what we’ve agreed to. A 2017 study showed that fewer than 10% of North Americans read such agreements before clicking through and automatically accepting them. License agreement, not ownership agreement
Whether we read them or not, these license agreements are legally binding, and have been upheld in court. The cornerstone of this legality is that software and other digital products are provided as a license to use, not an outright purchase to own. This means that legally, the products remain the property of the vendor; we merely pay for the right to access and use them under the terms of the EULA.
The precedent for this was set in 2010. U.S. courts ruled in favor of Autodesk when an eBay seller asked the courts to stop the software company shutting down eBay sales of old, unused copies of the AutoCAD software. Autodesk won the case on the grounds that the license agreement prohibited resale of the software, even if the copies had been unused. ..
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