click-wrap is legally supportable?

[James E. Harrell, Jr.]

Russ-

Very interesting. And (though again, I'm more of a technical guy, not a
legal
guy) the implications seem to go deeper than this. Supposing a developer
on my team, who has no authority to enter into contracts for my company,
builds a portion of our product using a GPL'd product. Or, even further
down the food chain, supposing I license a product from a 3rd party vendor,
and a member of *that* company used a GPL'd product without company consent
(and thus their product is not GPL'd).

Since my *company* has not consented on either occasion- does the license
hold?

Regards,
James

ps: I'm definitely playing devil's advocate here- not trying to figure out
a way around the license. :)

>-----Original Message-----
>From: Russell Nelson [mailto:nelson at crynwr.com]
>Sent: Monday, October 28, 2002 9:43 AM
>To: license-discuss at opensource.org
>Subject: click-wrap is legally supportable?
>
>
>I wonder if you are deemed to have accepted a click-wrap license
>if software requiring a click-wrap appears on your machine?  Have you
>agreed to every license which was clicked past on your machine?  What
>if an employee with no authority to bind the company to a contract
>clicked?  What if someone who has no ability to enter into a contract
>clicked (e.g. your kid)?  What if a repairman clicked?  Or the cable
>guy clicked?  In the various cases which are claimed as precedent, did
>the judge get asked these hard questions?
>-russ
>
>http://ask.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=02/10/26/2311244&mode=thread
>&tid=172&threshold=2
>
>Posted by Cliff on Monday October 28, @08:33AM
>from the fishy-practices dept.
>
>{e}N0S asks: "The cable guy came over to install a cable modem at my
>Dad's house. As I watched him do his stuff I noticed he was installing
>something called Broadjump Client Foundation. I know you don't need
>software for a cable modem to work so I asked if it was necessary. He
>said he had to do his list of things, and we had to sign that he did
>his list of things, otherwise he couldn't leave it with us to
>use. Since I can always remove the software, I agreed, but I noticed
>while he was flipping through the install, he was clicking 'agree' on
>every EULA that came up. Doing a search on Google for 'Broadjump
>Client Foundation' comes up with some pretty scary stuff as far as
>what it does, like: 'Builds a database of subscriber demographics and
>buying behaviors to help evolve and refine marketing efforts.' Now,
>how does this affect us? Neither myself or anyone in my family agreed
>to the software; the cable guy did. And is there anyway to get cable
>companies to stop doing this as I can imagine since the cable company
>is a monopoly in this town, that the percentage of people who still
>have this software on their computers is pretty high."
>
>--
>-russ nelson              http://russnelson.com |
>Crynwr sells support for free software  | PGPok | businesses persuade
>521 Pleasant Valley Rd. | +1 315 268 1925 voice | governments coerce
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>

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