Well, if you agree to it, I suppose it logically follows that everybody should be forced to agree to it. After all, you’re a reasonable man.
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How do you know?
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The EFF post mentions that we are becoming “renters.” But of course it’s worse than that. A renter pays by the week, month or whatever, and if the rented device is no longer satisfactory, for whatever reason, he or she can stop paying rent, hand in the device, and there’s no problem. A purchased device is different and implies the ability to keep using it for as long as the hardware lasts.
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In the future, we will have to break into and “steal” our own devices to make them really our own…
Disclaimer: not a lawyer here. Having said that:
In the US, the case law is mixed; thus far, decisions have been based on specifics of the case, not on if the EULA is or is not as a concept valid.
I pretend to solve the problem by leaving the mouse on “I agree” and letting my cats and children loose; I figure if a photographer doesn’t own copyright on a picture of a monkey just because the monkey pulled the shutter, I’m not bound by an EULA if someone too young to enter a contract (or not human enough) happens to click on it. Silly, yes, but so is the concept of a ‘contract’, which is what this seems to be, that isn’t subject to negotiation.
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That’s the ticket. Simply utter those words as you click the ‘OK’ and what do you know, it isn’t really a contract! If the Wii isn’t listening to what you say, too bad, it agreed.
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I suspect that if this were real contract law, rather than the ‘eh, clickwrap contracts of adhesion and mandatory binding arbitration is good enough for consumers and a lot cheaper!’ version of contract law, Nintendo would get smacked down, hard.
This is barely better than the ‘Nice shop you got there; be a pity if something happened’ school of contractual agreement you’d get from Vinny.
I’m not holding my breath on any actual redress, though.
Well, unless, under the new EULA/software it can’t go on as it did before because the EULA explicitly forbids/the new software prevents something you were doing with it. There are plenty of examples of console software patches that screwed up various games/saved files/functionality. (E.g. Sony altering the Playstation to not allow Linux installs.) If that happened, your “choices” are: “accept” the changes, or throw away the console.
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The future?
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Sadly true. Point taken…
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I was going to say!
did this come along with an update? I am not sure because I haven’t had this come across my Wii U yet.
I suppose I am just as reasonable as all those here telling me I shouldn’t agree to it…
I get the point that Nintendo appears to have screwed this up by not allowing an option to not agree to it, but I haven’t heard whether this EULA change is so bad that anyone wouldn’t agree to it or whether it is just the principle of the thing…
These slow changes in the long term change the game for consumers …Also , I guess what Nintendo aims to do with this is stop/prevent reselling of games .
I think the concern is the part that says …we may update or change your Wii U system, in whole or in part, without notice to you. Not being able to use the system without agreeing to such an onerous term, I think amounts to blackmail; imagine any other thing you bought required you to aggree to such terms.
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See, this is precisely the sort of crap that makes me a pc gamer these days.
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On that topic, I remember that a number of old PC games bundled what was essentially spyware as “anti-cheat software” with the game and practically required its use to play the game. Has that practice disappeared?
The nasty bit is that you basically can’t buy anything more complex than a screwdriver without it depending on a bunch of software, and most software licenses(and legal interpretations of what they can get away with) are derived from a tradition of protecting the copyright holder by treating the customer as a licensee with basically no rights whatsoever, rather from the (much longer and usually more favorable to the guy holding the box) body of law designed around real property.
There hasn’t been any terribly elegant adjustment to the emergence of stuff that looks like real property, costs like real property, and certainly appears in all respects (except possibly the weasel wording) to have been sold rather than licensed; but which would be a brick (sometimes not even one for which you could write your own software, in the case of locked down hardware) without a chunk of software.
Nope. It’s called “Steam”, “Uplay”, “Origin”.
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