Interesting Microsoft license clause re open source

[David Johnson]

On Wednesday 27 June 2001 08:27 pm, Lawrence E. Rosen wrote:

> First, you will almost certainly be held to the reasonable terms of a
> shrink-wrap agreement accompanying any of the common, widely-available,
> commercial software packages.  Nobody on license-discuss can claim to be
> ignorant of software licenses and pretend to be a babe-in-the-woods when
> it comes to accepting software under such licenses.  

This is an interesting statement. Are you implying that the general 
acceptance of a state of affairs is sufficient to make it law? I always 
thought that law was supposed to be a bit more objective than that.

Certainly it can be argued quite successfully that I am not ignorant of the 
existance of licenses cleverly hidden beneath shrink wrap, but whether I am 
subject to them is a completely different matter. 

What happens if I read the MS EULA and disagree with it? How can I be 
prevented from making archival copies and reverse engineering it?

> Second, the fact that you haven't "negotiated" the terms of such
> licenses probably only means that *unreasonable terms* of such licenses
> are unenforceable. 

Wouldn't clauses that take away users rights that have already been granted 
by copyright law be considered unreasonable?

-- 
David Johnson
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