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Comment Re:Comment Summary: EULA Summary's Would be Nice (Score 1) 233

The thing is, that pretty much mirrors the situation in Butcher. There was a disclaimer similar to what you suggested, and it was held to apply only in cases of high value transactions, since it would be unreasonable to expect the reasonable person to read the fine print on everything. (Although now that I think about it, I think Butcher may have be founded on a statutory claim, rather than estoppel. But misrepresentation is a pretty well established area, so I assume Canada has it's own laws on that point.)

Butcher is an Australian case, and a recent one at that, so it wouldn't surprise me if Canadian law was unclear or divergent on that point. But Curtis was a British case, so I'd have thought it would still apply.

Citations: (I really should have included these before)
Curtis v Chemical Cleaning and Dyeing Co [1951] 1 KB 805
Butcher v Lachlan Elder Realty (2004) 218 CLR 592

Comment Re:Comment Summary: EULA Summary's Would be Nice (Score 1) 233

The legal term for that is 'entire agreement clause'. i.e. the entire agreement is contained within the written contract, and no other representations can be included. While this is slightly less clear-cut, that wouldn't hold up in most cases either. Curtis (or modern applications of it) function via estoppel, which prevents the vendor from exercising their rights where it would be unconscionable to do so. (Estoppel is part of the law of equity, which evolved specifically to prevent the common law, which contract falls under, from being abused to effect unjust outcomes.) The unconsciousness is the grey area - where a reasonable person in the position of the plaintiff would have been expected to read the EULA in full, estoppel won't be made out. (see Butcher v Lachlan Elder Realty, where reliance on inaccurate information in the presence of a disclaimer was insufficient to found a claim in estoppel, given the value of the transaction. i.e. it was a house, not merely a piece of software).

Once again, this is not legal advice.

Comment Re:Clicking "I Agree" isn't binding (Score 1) 233

My point was that there's no good way to differentiate between the EULA and the sale of goods when acceptance of either involves clicking on something. Also, the agreement is binding from the moment the promises to transfer the money and goods are exchanged, not merely when first is dispatched.

Comment Re:Comment Summary: EULA Summary's Would be Nice (Score 1) 233

A summary would be legally binding, and would have the effect of limiting the contracts terms to those consistent with the summary. [see Curtis v Chemical Cleaning and Dyeing Co] This is why they're generally avoided by lawyers - they don't want to take the risk of any inconsistency.

IMO, the EULAs demonstrates a deeper problem - even if you 'buy' software, you still have to agree to the EULA in order to receive a license to use the software. The licensing and purchase should be inseparable. (There is also the question of how a EULA satisfies the issue of consideration - see http://www.lawiki.org/lawwiki/Shrink-wrapped_licence_agreements:_the_UK_legal_position).

(I am an Australian law student, this is not legal advice.)

Comment Re:Step 2 (Score 1) 233

If clicking 'I agree' wasn't binding, then how could you buy things online?
The real problem with EULA is that their terms are often excessive and unfair. This has been largely ameliorated in Australia, due to a recent law which grants a court the power to set aside unfair terms in consumer contracts (see http://www.freehills.com/5908.aspx).

Comment Re:MS Office (Score 1) 1880

I'll second this. I was somewhat forced into using Linux on my netbook (it's ARM, and Android wasn't really good enough), and Office is the only thing I've really missed. (Besides working drivers, but that's my fault for using an experimental kernel). KDE has Win7 beat in terms of usability, but decent Office compatibility is the one thing I'm missing. Hopefully this will be fixable with WINE once Win8 comes out with an ARM version of Office. (On an x86 system, I'd just use VirtualBox.)

Comment Re:Loss of Flexibility (Score 1) 86

I don't think you can legitimately download music anywhere without correct metadata applied. Even when you rip CDs most programs auto magically look up the CDDB database for the tags.

It's not so much an issue with downloaded music as with ripped music, which is the case for more obscure stuff. The CDDB database lookup was the issue I referred to when I noted that it doesn't always get it right. Also, let's not forget that the vast majority of music in existence is old music, or that FLAC is the most popular lossless format.

There's also a problem with tags which use non-latin alphabets, like j-pop. The right tags for those consist entirely of characters impossible or extremely difficult to type on a conventional keyboard. I would concede that this is a much more niche issue though, if there's a native Japanese version of Android with a suitable keyboard.

Comment Re:Argument about Unity? (Score 1) 330

There is no argument about Unity. We all agree that it sucks. There is minor disagreement about the degree to which it sucks.

Does that really stop anyone from writing Linux applications?

I'd say it does. Until now, Ubuntu has been regarded as the de facto OS for new users, and accordingly, developers have targeted it for development (along with maybe Fedora cause they like it). More capable users generally don't have any problems with downloading, compiling and installing the source. Now we have to seriously consider which distro to target, and the decision isn't as easy.

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