Welcome to Tech Stuff, a production from iHeartRadio. Hey thereon Welcome to Tech Stuff, I'm your host, Jonathan Strickland. I'm an executive producer with iHeart Podcasts and how the tech are you? So? Not that long ago, I talked about a story about Roku and how the company made a change to its end User License Agreement or EULA, and it raised quite a few eyebrows, even though there's been precedent for this. So the new terms included language regarding how to resolve disputes with the company. If you're a customer and you have a dispute with Roku and you've agreed to their ULA, this is how it works. So essentially, Roku would require customers to agree to an informal dispute resolution clause. Now, this would mean that a user would have to agree to bring any legal complaints directly to Roku lawyers first before going any further, and at that point, the lawyer would presumably present a resolution to the consumer. And even beyond that, there's a forced arbitration clause that essentially says a Roku customer signs away their rights to bring lawsuits or to join class action lawsuits brought against Roku. This in itself is not unprecedented. It's not the only time a company has said, Hey, in order for you to use this stuff, you have to agree that you won't sue us if you have a problem with it. Other companies have included forced arbitration clauses in their EULA statements. And those are those things that nobody ever reads, right, And when I say nobody, I don't really mean no one, but like, there have been various pieces I've read that have suggested that only one tenth of one percent of all people who agree to a ULA have bothered to read any of it, let alone the whole thing. These agreements are designed to protect companies from liability. They're also meant to extend copyright protections for stuff that isn't typically covered under traditional copyright law, or to fill in gaps, and generally speaking, they tend to hold up in court, at least they do if they're not poorly constructed. We'll talk more about a couple of court cases later in this episode to kind of illustrate that. But things get worse from here, right, So Roku says, Hey, if you agree to this, it means you can't sue US if something were to happen and you had a dispute, well they also had it where if you had a device that uses Roku services, like a television with Roku built into it, or a Roku streaming device, whatever it may be, then you would get prompted to agree to these new changes with a big old agree button. So there'd be like one option to agree. There was no other option. You couldn't choose no, I do not agree. So in order to opt out of this ula, you would actually have to track down the information so that you could send a handwritten or type letter through the old postal service, Yeah, good old fashioned US mail. And even then you could only do it if you had opted out within thirty days of the new terms applying to you. Now, these terms went into effect on February twenty, twenty twenty four, so that time is already up. The deadline has passed. Not that I think most people would have taken that effort, you know, to write in and opt out of these terms, Like it's the sort of thing that a company does knowing that practically no one out there is going to take the effort to opt out, Like you can opt in very easily just click that little button, but to opt out. You know, it reminds me of a passage in a Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy where you had to find the terms of the agreement by going into a very dark and dangerous basement of a building and find it in a disused lavatory that had a sign on it saying beware of the leopard. Akin to that, and even writing in didn't cut it, like you had to do more than that. Customers would have to include a lot of information. They had to include their own personal information, of course, like their name and their contact info, but they also had to list whichever Roku products they were concerned about, so presumably all the Roku products that they actually owned and used, and then preferably they were to include a copy of the receipt for those items, although that was also said to be quote unquote optional, but it was listed as one of the things you were supposed to send in was a copy of your receipt. And a big old nod to Devin cold Away of tech Crunch for writing the article Roku disables TVs and streaming devices until users consent to new terms, because that really is what inspired this episode. And kind of gave me the launching point for it. Anyway, that Roku example, while seeming to be pretty egregious, is really just one in which companies have created lengthy, complicated, and and sometimes downright shady terms that they expect customers to agree to, and most of the time customers do agree to them, because again, no one's bothered to read the actual agreement, and you know, it's hard to fault customers to do this. I want to tell you I am not the person who reads ayula. I don't read all of these EULAs all the way through. I might scan one once in a blue moon, but that is the exception, not the rule. So I am not putting myself above anyone else here, because who has time to read them? Some EULAs get insanely long. Jason Cohen of PC Magazine has an article titled it would take seventeen hours to read the terms and conditions of the thirteen most popular apps. This was written back in twenty twenty, so who knows, it may be even more in twenty twenty four. So I think folks can be forgiven for skipping reading sessions in order to use whatever it was they wanted to use. I've seen lots of different summaries of how long some of these EULAs are. Like Microsoft had one that was more than eighteen thousand words long. Some of them are topping above twenty thousand words. That's a lot of material. This episode, the script I've written out is less than four thousand words, and as I'm going through it, you guys know, it takes me like more than half an hour to get through these episodes. So that's just speaking it out to you. These are really long agreements. So today I wanted to talk a little bit about why EULAs exist in the first place, and to cover what their purpose happens to be. Some examples maybe that have been a little bit on the extreme side, maybe a little bit about the legal cases. So let's just jump right in now. To understand the humble eula. One thing we need to do is understand how digital products are different from physical ones beyond the obvious that is. So, for example, let's say you went out to a local music's or to purchase an album from your favorite artist or group. This album happens to be on vinyl, So you're buying a vinyl long playing record album, and you bring your purchase home, and then you do whatever you want with it. You can listen to it. You can listen to it as many times as you like. It doesn't matter if you've just listened to it one hundred times. You can listen to it for one hundred and one. You can trade it with a friend for something else. You could gift it to someone. You could just give it away. You could even sell it if you suddenly remembered that you don't own a turntable, so there's nothing else you could do with it. If you wanted. You could even just shatter the vinyl in a display of unbridled passion. The physical object of that album is yours. You own that physical object, but it is not your intellectual property right. Buying the album obviously does not give you ownership of the music that's on that album. That seems obvious. If I went out and bought a copy of all of the Beatles albums, I wouldn't suddenly own the rights to the Beatles discography. That would be a chaotic world if it were otherwise. So you wouldn't have the right to make endless copies of this album to give away to friends. You couldn't do that because you don't own the music. Here in the United States, you could make a backup copy for yourself. That is allowed under fair use. So if you bought an album, you could make a backup of it. If you bought it on vinyl and you thought, I want to make sure I can listen to this even if something happens to this vinyl album, then you could copy it to like cassette or even a digital file. But that's about the extent of your rights. As far as that goes. With a digital copy, things are clearly different. There's no physical medium to speak of. There's a file, and that just consists of zeros and ones arranged in such a way that, when processed by the proper program, is gonna play back a piece of music. You can buy such a file, but because that file isn't imprisoned in some physical form, the copyright owners want to have a way to keep a reasonable or sometimes unreasonable amount of control over the distribution of that file. After all, if your livelihood depends upon selling digital content, you don't want to make a single sale and then see your customer go on to make an infinite number of copies of that work and then distribute it for less money or even for free, because you would be out of a job and all of your hard work would be out of your control. This very obvious distinction between physical media and digital media, which extends beyond just music into lots of other realms, creates a bit of a challenge for the entities that produce the media in question. We're able to treat physical media as personal property. Typically, the challenges of making endless copies of physical media are such that there isn't that much of a threat to the powers that be once you get your grubby little hands on that vinyl album. That doesn't mean that the powers that be are always cool with advancements in physical media. Film and TV studio companies and music studios notoriously have been wary of this. Film and TV studios fought against the Humble VCR when it became commercially available, and the music industry wasn't really keen on the concept of recordable cassette tapes or writeable compact discs. But generally speaking, the realities and limitations of making physical copies are such that any opposition to the technology fades away over time, because it turns out the trouble you have to go to in order to make a significant number of copies of physical media is such that very few people will actually bother with it. Right, Like, there are devices out there that would allow you to do things like transfer a recording from one medium to a whole bunch of copies at once, but even then it was limited because you're talking about physical media. So you might have something where you can make one master copy and then create ten copies at a time, but that's still ten. It's not you know, thousands or million. So eventually a lot of these companies kind of backed off, but a quick side on the VCR issue, that one was one that would make its way all the way to the US Supreme Court, namely the Sony Corporation of America versus Universal City Studios, Incorporated. So this was in nineteen eighty four. So in the nineteen seventies, when Sony introduced the Betamax machine, a few studios got very upset at what they viewed as a device that was just designed for copyright infringement. So Universal sued and alleged that Sony should be held liable for each and every instance of copyright infringement that resulted from customers using Betamax in this way, and the case went back and forth in the court system. Sony would win one case, then Universal would get the decision reversed on appeal, and then ultimately Sony submitted the case to the Supreme Court. During that case, the court ruled that using a device like a VCR for the purposes of time shifting, that is, being able to watch media on your schedule, not on a channel schedule. Because remember this is at a time time where you were just watching broadcast television or cable TV, and it was just TV schedules. There was no other way to watch. There was no on demand watching. So to use a VCR to record a program so that you could watch it when you were actually home, the court decided that was under fair use. They also found that the argument that the Beta Max and devices like it were made expressly for the purposes of copyright infringement were false. That Beta Max could make copies, but it could also just playback tapes that were sold in stores. And one other interesting element of this case. One of the people who provided testimony in support of VCR technology was mister Rogers, as in Fred Rogers, the creator and host of the Public television program mister Rogers neighborhood. He liked VCRs just the way they were. Okay, we're going to talk more about ULA's and the differences between digital and physical media, but first let's take a quick break to thank our sponsors. We're back. So before I was talking about physical media. But digital media is different from physical media, and there's no getting around it. It can be incredibly easy to make copies of digital media, and it isn't governed by the same set of physical restrictions and limitations that we get with the physical stuff we buy. However, there's also often a need to copy digital media legitimately. So, for example, if you want to save a file to your hard drive, that is copying, and you might have to save something to a hard drive in order to be able to use the thing you purchase, like some software. Let's just talk about software in the good old days of physical media, stuff like optical discs, you know, like a CD. So let's say you've gone out to a physical brick and mortar store because back in the day, and you buy a copy of some software that you want to use, and you purchase it legally, right, you've spent your money on this in a legal retail establishment. You come back, the software is on a compact disc, and in order to use it, you actually need to transfer the file from the compact disc to your hard drive and then you're going to be able to use the software. Except you're not actually pulling the file off of the CD, like removing it from the CD and then poorting it over to your computer. You're copying the file from your CD to your computer. The file information is still on the CD, right, it's in two places. Now, it's on your computer and it's on the CD. But you've had to do this in order to run the software properly, rather than relying on your optical drive the whole time. So here's a case where copying the file is part of the process in order to use the product as it was intended. So this is an allowable use case. But making infinite copies of the file that's on that CD and then distributing it to everyone you know, obviously that's not a legitimate use case. So how does the file's producer distinguish between these two scenarios. They do it by creating a licensing agreement. So in this case, the agreement would grant the licensee the customer, in other words, the right to make a copy of the file for the purposes of saving the information to their hard drive. But this agreement would also spell out that this is really the only acceptable instance for making a copy, with maybe an exception for making a backup for the interest of fair use. That's a possible other clause that could be there. So the license agreement defines how the customer can use the software legally, and the customer has to acknowledge and agree to the license before they make use of the software. Sometimes all they have to do is just make use of the software, and that ends up being an acknowledgment an agreement to the EULA right like they may not have to actually click on a button or anything. It may be that the EULA spells out that by using the software, it intrinsically means the customer has agreed to the terms, and the concept is that all parties are aware of and agreed to these terms of use, and then things can go on their own merry way. One thing to keep in mind is that because of the license issue, what we're talking about is not ownership, right, it's access. That's what the license grants the licensee. It grants them access to whatever it is that's licensed, but they don't own it. The person that or entity that sold it owns it. So even if you have a copy sitting on your computer, you don't own that copy. You're just licensed to access it. That's the foundational idea behind a ULAP. It protects the producer and holds customers accountable for accessing the licensed material in a very specific and approved way. That's a real kicker, isn't it, Because being able to access material means that the producer can actually define the rules that favor them. I mean, they're the only party that's making up these rules. This is not a negociation. It's not a process where collaboratively buyer and seller come together and they heckle and they come to an agreement. This is where the seller gets to dictate all the terms, and they can redefine the rules with little to no warning. They can change the rules after people have already agreed to a different set of rules. That's how we get situations like what's happening with Roku that you as a customer, maybe you've read the whole eula top to bottom, and maybe you're like, there's some stuff in here I don't really like, but overall I can agree to this, and you move forward, and then they change the rules of the agreement on you, and the next thing, you know, because of the nature of you las, you are stuck with an agreement that you no longer really like or or feel is warranted. One example brought up in a book titled The End of Ownership by Aaron Parson Now and Jason Schultz, which I actually purchased for this episode. Great book, by the way, I recommend checking it out. But one case is a pretty infamous one with Amazon and George Orwell's nineteen eighty four. Now, the fact that it involves nineteen eighty four in particular is coincidental, but it's still kind of ironic. So what happened was that you had some people who purchased an ebook copy of the classic dystopian novel nineteen eighty four by George Orwell, which, among other things, warrens of the dangers of authoritarian governments and mass surveillance and the control of information. But then it turned out that the vendor that was selling this ebook over at Amazon didn't actually have legal permission to do that. So what did Amazon do Well, it pulled the digital copy from the people who purchased it, and it then issued a refund. So it meant people would turn on an ebook reader like a Kindle and then suddenly they see that the copy of nineteen eighty four that they had purchased was gone. And again, very ironic. It looks like the control of information. It looks like the thing you bought got reclaimed. And when you think about it, that's pretty wild, right. I mean, if you had bought a copy of a book from a bookstore, like a physical book, you wouldn't expect someone from that bookstore to show up at your home to say, hey, turns out the publisher of that book didn't have the right to publish it, so I'm gonna have to take it back. That would be crazy. And yet due to the nature of digital distribution, this can and did happen with Amazon and nineteen eighty four. So a lot of news outlets really had a field day about this, and I get it. I mean, it's very like poetic and ironic. But Amazon was in a tough place because the vendor did not have the right to sell the book, which meant the rightful parties that could sell the book would have a really good reason to go after Amazon for allowing it to all happen if Amazon didn't do something about it. As a modern eula can be structured to allow for this kind of thing, where a company can reclaim digital material even if you thought you owned it. So another great example would be if you purchased a digital title on a service like a platform. It's one thing to be a subscriber to say Netflix, for example, it's another thing. Let's say that you are on Amazon Prime and you've purchased a digital copy of a movie. Could it be possible for Amazon to revoke that access to that digital title in the future. Absolutely, that could happen. You know, you could purchase a DVD of the movie, and you've got that DVD forever, right until the DVD degrades to a point where you can't use it or you don't have a player that can play it anymore. They could still go obsolete that way, but otherwise you still have access to it digitally. If something were to happen, Amazon could potentially just remove it from your library and now you can't access it anymore. That's a possibilit So the license always has conditions, and if you violate those conditions, then you could lose access to the thing you thought you had purchased. It can be taken away from you, and those conditions can change pretty much at the whim of the company that's behind the thing. And it's kind of like what Darth Vader said to Lando Calrissian, I am altering the deal. Pray I do not alter it any further. This is really an issue with digital media in general, not just because of ULA's So again, I was talking about Netflix and licensing agreements. Well, there are license agreements between Netflix and various studios out there, right, So you have no guarantee that a title that you really like is going to remain on any given streaming service. One day it might be there, and then the next day it could be gone because of some agreement made between the service and the company that owns the rights to that title, and it expired and wasn't renewed. I always think of that Mitchell and Web Look, which is a British comedy sketch show with Rob Web and David Mitchell. I found that on Netflix years ago and fell in love with that series, loved it and one day the series just disappeared. At one point, just the third season disappeared. Seasons one, two, and four were still there, but three went away, and then eventually all of them went away. And then I looked to see where I could get access to it, and I couldn't anywhere in America. There were no legal ways to access the material. I eventually had to purchase the English DVDs and get a region free player so that I could watch the show because I no longer had access to it. And that's just the way it is. You don't own the media. For media that exists on servers, Like on an online video game, a company might choose to shut those servers down in order to reduce costs, and effectively that kills the game. So even if you had purchased a copy of this game at full retail price when it came out, you wouldn't be able to play that game anymore because the servers that existed that allowed you to play that game are now offline. Like that's a real problem, not just for like multiplayer online games, which that's pretty obvious, right. If it's an online game, then if the servers go down, there's no server to log into, you can't play anymore. But there are single player games that, as part of the digital rights management system, require you to contact a specific server that verifies the copy of the game you're playing is a legitimate copy. And if those servers go down, you have a legitimate copy of a single player game that's not an online experience that cannot work anymore because there's no longer a server for it to ping to to verify that your copy is legitimate. This is a real problem. And because you never actually owned a copy of the game, you really just owned a license to access that game under certain conditions, you're kind of stuck. Okay, we've got a ton more stuff to talk about, including an actual court case, but before we get further into that, let's take another quick break to thank our sponsors. All Right, So there's a piece I read for this that I recommend y'all check out. Jason Kobler wrote a piece for Motherboard and it's titled Corporations use end user license agreements to create a parallel legal system, And the title really sums things up pretty nicely. So, in order to secure the protections that the company desires, and in order to force customers into behaviors that ultimately benefit the company. These organizations craft legal agreements that restrict customer rights and allow for practices that aren't otherwise covered by law. The traditional aspects of property law do not apply. Right. We've talked about that, because there are differences between physical and digital types of media. The rights of property ownership you would originally assume would apply to you, they don't apply. Moreover, these agreements can be so long and sometimes filled with jargon that customers are not incentivized to read through it all, so the deck is stacked in favor of the companies. Sometimes you're not even allowed to read an agreement until you've actually gone through the trouble of making the purchase. So it's you can't read before you decide to buy, it's when you buy, and then you are able to access the agreement, So you don't necessarily know what you're getting into until after money has already changed hands. Maybe then you would be able to secure a refund, but with digital property, that's not always a guaranteed, nor is it always easy, right Like, some platforms make it easier than others, but it's not always easy to get a refund. If by the way that you're not able to read the agreement until after you've made a purchase. You are supposed to be able to get a refund because it would be ludicrous otherwise, like you don't know what you're getting into until you've made a purchase. Then you're told too late what the deal is. And if you said, well, I don't accept those terms, you have to be able to get a refund or else what's the point. So Coupler points out more than a few cases in which companies used a EULA to step well beyond just defining terms of ownership or use. So, for example, there's the case of John Deere. That's the company that's best known for making farming equipment like tractors. And we've talked about this company a lot in episodes about the right to repair, which we'll talk about in a second. John Deere is a company that for a very long time has taken steps to restrict how and where farmers can maintain and repair their own equipment. So the company wants to have control over that whole system, much like Apple does with its products, and to that end, the EULA with John Deere equipment included clauses that said farmers were to take their equipment only to official John Deere licensed repair shops. And if you happen to be a farmer who lived a really long way from such a place, and then your tractor broke down, you'd really be up the creek, because you know you've made this agreement not to take your tractor to like the shop down the road that isn't a licensed John Deere repair shop. ULA's were not the only weapon John Deere used to achieve this ecosystem, but it was kind of part of the arsenal. Another example that Kobler sites in his article was for you torrant or however you'd like to pronounce it. So this was or is a bit torrent client, and torrents already have their own shaky history. A lot of people have used torrents to trade in pirated material. But this torrent client up the ante back in twenty fifteen when users were prompted to accept an agreement before actually using the service. This agreement said that users would allow for the installation of a cryptocurrency minor on their own machines. So if you didn't read the agreement, let's say you signed up to the U torrant client. Most folks did not bother to read this agreement. I wouldn't know that you had just agreed to join a cryptocurrency mining operation and that your computer's resources were going to be borrowed for that purpose. And of course you're not mining cryptocurrency for yourself. Instead, your computational resources were going to a much larger operation that benefits the U Torrent folks, which is pretty sneaky, but it was in the ULA. So how do ULA's fare in court? Well, generally speaking, they do pretty darn well. Courts, at least here in the United States, have favored companies more than they have favored customers traditionally. So, for example, there was a court case called Feldman versus Google Incorporated in two thousand and seven. The plaintiff, Feldman, was a lawyer who had purchased ads from Google, and Feldman would owe Google money whenever people would click on one of his ads. But Feldman said he was victim of click fraud, that folks who had no interest in retaining his services were clicking on his ads anyway, and they were driving up costs and costing him money. So Feldman filed a lawsuit in Pennsylvania and said that in part, he wasn't given appropriate notice of Google's clauses before entering into this arrangement. Google moved to have the case tried in Santa Clara County, California, because the EULA actually included a statement that said all disputes were to be resolved there, and the EULA also included passages that provided protection against legal liability in the case of click fraud. Now, Feldman said he did not have appropriate notice to this agreement and that there was no mutual assent upon the agreement and thus it would make it invalid as a contract. But the court found that Feldman had to click the agree button in order to use the service in the first place, and that this amounted to signing a contract agreement, and so Feldman's case was unsuccessful. That he apparently didn't read the agreement first really fell on him on Google. He also had argued that it was invalid because there was no information about pricing in that agreement, but the court found that there were enough indications of the process to determine pricing that not including the pricing itself didn't matter, because what the EULA did have in it was the essentially the formula to calculate what pricing would be, so Feldman ultimately lost this case. Now, some contract lawyers and some other folks have pointed out that traditionally, with most contracts, you do have a negotiation period so you can come to terms that are agreeable to both parties. But in the case of ayula, there is no negotiation. There's no back and forth traditionally, so instead you either agree to the terms or you don't, and if you don't, you don't use the product or service. Those are really your options. There's no way for you to get more favorable terms in most cases. But obviously the other party, the company, can change things and ask you to agree to altered terms of service, which is an unbalanced power dynamic going on here. Now, there are some instances where a court could find in favor of the consumer. For example, let's say a company makes a product with a eula attached to it. The customers are not able to read the eula until after they've purchased the product, so called shrink wrap eula. A customer buys the product, then they're able to read the eula. The customer then objects to the eula and they want to return the product for a refund. If there is no reasonable time frame for them to make such a return, a court could find in favor of the customer because they'd say, like, your EULA doesn't isn't enforceable, because there's no way for the customer to object to the EULA and have it mean anything. If the company does give a reasonable amount of time, let's say that they give you thirty days to make a return. If you object to the ula and if you fail to return it within the thirty days, then the court is probably going to find in favor of the company because they'd say, well, they gave you a reasonable timeframe to request a refund, and if you didn't respond within that timeframe, that's on you. If a customer can make a case that the terms of a EULA are too vague or too complicated for a reasonable person to understand them, then the courts could also find that that particular EULA is unenforceable. So that's one reason a company might be discouraged from obfuscating things with a lot of legal jargon, because it can come back to haunt them if someone bothers to bring a lawsuit against them. Lawsuits are really expensive, though, so unless the customer is really determined to stick it to this company, it's not likely to happen. But if it does happen, the consumer can show, hey, this EULA is purposefully complex and vague. A court might find that particular eula to be unenforceable, but you know that's a long shot. It's such a huge undertaking and it's so expensive. So maybe companies could avoid making things confusing with legal language, but they could still bury consumers in ulas that are thousands of words long, and it might not be complicated or vague. It might just be dull and exhausting. So again, no one really bothers to read them. But if they were to try and challenge them in court, the court might say, well, yeah, it's long and it's boring, but nothing here is vague or complicated, so technically it stands. There are also social changes that are pushing back against some EULAs. I mentioned John Deere earlier. That's a company that's been affected by the recent right to repair movement. Advocates have really pushed for laws that give consumers more control over how they maintain and repair their purchases, and they have pushed back against this closed ecosystem approach used by companies like John Deere and Apple, and there's been progress in several states here in the United States, though it's not really a nationwide trend as of yet. But obviously this is a really big step. You know, getting states to create new legislation that makes certain passages in certain EULAs unenforceable isn't the sort of thing that the average person can really do themselves. It requires much larger movements. So again, when it comes to the average consumer, it often feels like there's not much you can do, and that's usually actually the case. Now. I know I've said a lot of negative stuff about ULA's in this episode, but they do actually serve a purpose. Ulas are needed to cover gaps in intellectual property law, particularly here in the digital space. They aren't all malicious or overbearing, and you could argue that they actually stand as evidence that legislators need to make new property ownership laws that cover the digital space and modern technologies, and that these laws would then supersede EULAs or just make them moot. In fact, a lot of people have argued for this that we need new property laws that would cover things in the digital realm, and that This would really go a long way to solving these issues. But it's really hard to get a body like the US Congress to take up matters of property ownership. It just isn't something that is a super high priority right now, So I wouldn't hold my breath for it anyway. That about sums it up for youula's except for this bit, should you read every EULA before you agree to it? Well, I honestly can't tell you that it would do you much good. You might have a better understanding of what it is you're getting into. I'm not sure that that's a good enough reason. Maybe you would read something that you really object to and you just decide this isn't for me. That's you know, that's legitimate, But goodness knows, if you're like me, you do not have the time to read through a novel's worth of legal language just to be able to play a game or listen to music or use a piece of software. If you do want to be part of that tenth of a percent of people who bother to read any of the ULA at all, go for it. You'll be bucking the trend and showing companies that you mean business. Unless you just hit. I agree at the end, because then they got you. Anyway, that's sort of the purpose and the use of EULA's. It is unfortunate that there are companies that are kind of overstepping their bounds, in my opinion, in order to craft ulas to really restrict consumer rights. It's also unfortunate that the courts typically find in favor of end user license agreements unless it is considered to be unconscionable or too complex or vague. And again, the only way that that even happens is if someone brings a lawsuit to bring it to the court's attention. It's not like courts are evaluating these license agreements before they go out. That doesn't happen. So yeah, it's kind of an unfair landscape and I don't see it changing anytime soon. And yeah, all I can do is set a flea out to all the companies out there not to go bonkers with those terms in ULA's because the more people find out about it, the more ticked off they become, and you start to see movements rise up that could very well bring legal changes that will just completely invalidate those end user license agreements anyway, So I mean, I guess I could say just keep it up because the reckoning is covering, but I think that gets a little too apocalyptic. I hope all of you out there are well, and I'll talk to you again, really soon. Tech Stuff is an iHeartRadio production. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.

Welcome to Tech Stuff, a production from iHeartRadio. Hey thereon Welcome to Tech Stuff, I'm your host, Jonathan Strickland. I'm an executive producer with iHeart Podcasts and how the tech are you? So? Not that long ago, I talked about a story about Roku and how the company made a change to its end User License Agreement or EULA, and it raised quite a few eyebrows, even though there's been precedent for this. So the new terms included language regarding how to resolve disputes with the company. If you're a customer and you have a dispute with Roku and you've agreed to their ULA, this is how it works. So essentially, Roku would require customers to agree to an informal dispute resolution clause. Now, this would mean that a user would have to agree to bring any legal complaints directly to Roku lawyers first before going any further, and at that point, the lawyer would presumably present a resolution to the consumer. And even beyond that, there's a forced arbitration clause that essentially says a Roku customer signs away their rights to bring lawsuits or to join class action lawsuits brought against Roku. This in itself is not unprecedented. It's not the only time a company has said, Hey, in order for you to use this stuff, you have to agree that you won't sue us if you have a problem with it. Other companies have included forced arbitration clauses in their EULA statements. And those are those things that nobody ever reads, right, And when I say nobody, I don't really mean no one, but like, there have been various pieces I've read that have suggested that only one tenth of one percent of all people who agree to a ULA have bothered to read any of it, let alone the whole thing. These agreements are designed to protect companies from liability. They're also meant to extend copyright protections for stuff that isn't typically covered under traditional copyright law, or to fill in gaps, and generally speaking, they tend to hold up in court, at least they do if they're not poorly constructed. We'll talk more about a couple of court cases later in this episode to kind of illustrate that. But things get worse from here, right, So Roku says, Hey, if you agree to this, it means you can't sue US if something were to happen and you had a dispute, well they also had it where if you had a device that uses Roku services, like a television with Roku built into it, or a Roku streaming device, whatever it may be, then you would get prompted to agree to these new changes with a big old agree button. So there'd be like one option to agree. There was no other option. You couldn't choose no, I do not agree. So in order to opt out of this ula, you would actually have to track down the information so that you could send a handwritten or type letter through the old postal service, Yeah, good old fashioned US mail. And even then you could only do it if you had opted out within thirty days of the new terms applying to you. Now, these terms went into effect on February twenty, twenty twenty four, so that time is already up. The deadline has passed. Not that I think most people would have taken that effort, you know, to write in and opt out of these terms, Like it's the sort of thing that a company does knowing that practically no one out there is going to take the effort to opt out, Like you can opt in very easily just click that little button, but to opt out. You know, it reminds me of a passage in a Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy where you had to find the terms of the agreement by going into a very dark and dangerous basement of a building and find it in a disused lavatory that had a sign on it saying beware of the leopard. Akin to that, and even writing in didn't cut it, like you had to do more than that. Customers would have to include a lot of information. They had to include their own personal information, of course, like their name and their contact info, but they also had to list whichever Roku products they were concerned about, so presumably all the Roku products that they actually owned and used, and then preferably they were to include a copy of the receipt for those items, although that was also said to be quote unquote optional, but it was listed as one of the things you were supposed to send in was a copy of your receipt. And a big old nod to Devin cold Away of tech Crunch for writing the article Roku disables TVs and streaming devices until users consent to new terms, because that really is what inspired this episode. And kind of gave me the launching point for it. Anyway, that Roku example, while seeming to be pretty egregious, is really just one in which companies have created lengthy, complicated, and and sometimes downright shady terms that they expect customers to agree to, and most of the time customers do agree to them, because again, no one's bothered to read the actual agreement, and you know, it's hard to fault customers to do this. I want to tell you I am not the person who reads ayula. I don't read all of these EULAs all the way through. I might scan one once in a blue moon, but that is the exception, not the rule. So I am not putting myself above anyone else here, because who has time to read them? Some EULAs get insanely long. Jason Cohen of PC Magazine has an article titled it would take seventeen hours to read the terms and conditions of the thirteen most popular apps. This was written back in twenty twenty, so who knows, it may be even more in twenty twenty four. So I think folks can be forgiven for skipping reading sessions in order to use whatever it was they wanted to use. I've seen lots of different summaries of how long some of these EULAs are. Like Microsoft had one that was more than eighteen thousand words long. Some of them are topping above twenty thousand words. That's a lot of material. This episode, the script I've written out is less than four thousand words, and as I'm going through it, you guys know, it takes me like more than half an hour to get through these episodes. So that's just speaking it out to you. These are really long agreements. So today I wanted to talk a little bit about why EULAs exist in the first place, and to cover what their purpose happens to be. Some examples maybe that have been a little bit on the extreme side, maybe a little bit about the legal cases. So let's just jump right in now. To understand the humble eula. One thing we need to do is understand how digital products are different from physical ones beyond the obvious that is. So, for example, let's say you went out to a local music's or to purchase an album from your favorite artist or group. This album happens to be on vinyl, So you're buying a vinyl long playing record album, and you bring your purchase home, and then you do whatever you want with it. You can listen to it. You can listen to it as many times as you like. It doesn't matter if you've just listened to it one hundred times. You can listen to it for one hundred and one. You can trade it with a friend for something else. You could gift it to someone. You could just give it away. You could even sell it if you suddenly remembered that you don't own a turntable, so there's nothing else you could do with it. If you wanted. You could even just shatter the vinyl in a display of unbridled passion. The physical object of that album is yours. You own that physical object, but it is not your intellectual property right. Buying the album obviously does not give you ownership of the music that's on that album. That seems obvious. If I went out and bought a copy of all of the Beatles albums, I wouldn't suddenly own the rights to the Beatles discography. That would be a chaotic world if it were otherwise. So you wouldn't have the right to make endless copies of this album to give away to friends. You couldn't do that because you don't own the music. Here in the United States, you could make a backup copy for yourself. That is allowed under fair use. So if you bought an album, you could make a backup of it. If you bought it on vinyl and you thought, I want to make sure I can listen to this even if something happens to this vinyl album, then you could copy it to like cassette or even a digital file. But that's about the extent of your rights. As far as that goes. With a digital copy, things are clearly different. There's no physical medium to speak of. There's a file, and that just consists of zeros and ones arranged in such a way that, when processed by the proper program, is gonna play back a piece of music. You can buy such a file, but because that file isn't imprisoned in some physical form, the copyright owners want to have a way to keep a reasonable or sometimes unreasonable amount of control over the distribution of that file. After all, if your livelihood depends upon selling digital content, you don't want to make a single sale and then see your customer go on to make an infinite number of copies of that work and then distribute it for less money or even for free, because you would be out of a job and all of your hard work would be out of your control. This very obvious distinction between physical media and digital media, which extends beyond just music into lots of other realms, creates a bit of a challenge for the entities that produce the media in question. We're able to treat physical media as personal property. Typically, the challenges of making endless copies of physical media are such that there isn't that much of a threat to the powers that be once you get your grubby little hands on that vinyl album. That doesn't mean that the powers that be are always cool with advancements in physical media. Film and TV studio companies and music studios notoriously have been wary of this. Film and TV studios fought against the Humble VCR when it became commercially available, and the music industry wasn't really keen on the concept of recordable cassette tapes or writeable compact discs. But generally speaking, the realities and limitations of making physical copies are such that any opposition to the technology fades away over time, because it turns out the trouble you have to go to in order to make a significant number of copies of physical media is such that very few people will actually bother with it. Right, Like, there are devices out there that would allow you to do things like transfer a recording from one medium to a whole bunch of copies at once, but even then it was limited because you're talking about physical media. So you might have something where you can make one master copy and then create ten copies at a time, but that's still ten. It's not you know, thousands or million. So eventually a lot of these companies kind of backed off, but a quick side on the VCR issue, that one was one that would make its way all the way to the US Supreme Court, namely the Sony Corporation of America versus Universal City Studios, Incorporated. So this was in nineteen eighty four. So in the nineteen seventies, when Sony introduced the Betamax machine, a few studios got very upset at what they viewed as a device that was just designed for copyright infringement. So Universal sued and alleged that Sony should be held liable for each and every instance of copyright infringement that resulted from customers using Betamax in this way, and the case went back and forth in the court system. Sony would win one case, then Universal would get the decision reversed on appeal, and then ultimately Sony submitted the case to the Supreme Court. During that case, the court ruled that using a device like a VCR for the purposes of time shifting, that is, being able to watch media on your schedule, not on a channel schedule. Because remember this is at a time time where you were just watching broadcast television or cable TV, and it was just TV schedules. There was no other way to watch. There was no on demand watching. So to use a VCR to record a program so that you could watch it when you were actually home, the court decided that was under fair use. They also found that the argument that the Beta Max and devices like it were made expressly for the purposes of copyright infringement were false. That Beta Max could make copies, but it could also just playback tapes that were sold in stores. And one other interesting element of this case. One of the people who provided testimony in support of VCR technology was mister Rogers, as in Fred Rogers, the creator and host of the Public television program mister Rogers neighborhood. He liked VCRs just the way they were. Okay, we're going to talk more about ULA's and the differences between digital and physical media, but first let's take a quick break to thank our sponsors. We're back. So before I was talking about physical media. But digital media is different from physical media, and there's no getting around it. It can be incredibly easy to make copies of digital media, and it isn't governed by the same set of physical restrictions and limitations that we get with the physical stuff we buy. However, there's also often a need to copy digital media legitimately. So, for example, if you want to save a file to your hard drive, that is copying, and you might have to save something to a hard drive in order to be able to use the thing you purchase, like some software. Let's just talk about software in the good old days of physical media, stuff like optical discs, you know, like a CD. So let's say you've gone out to a physical brick and mortar store because back in the day, and you buy a copy of some software that you want to use, and you purchase it legally, right, you've spent your money on this in a legal retail establishment. You come back, the software is on a compact disc, and in order to use it, you actually need to transfer the file from the compact disc to your hard drive and then you're going to be able to use the software. Except you're not actually pulling the file off of the CD, like removing it from the CD and then poorting it over to your computer. You're copying the file from your CD to your computer. The file information is still on the CD, right, it's in two places. Now, it's on your computer and it's on the CD. But you've had to do this in order to run the software properly, rather than relying on your optical drive the whole time. So here's a case where copying the file is part of the process in order to use the product as it was intended. So this is an allowable use case. But making infinite copies of the file that's on that CD and then distributing it to everyone you know, obviously that's not a legitimate use case. So how does the file's producer distinguish between these two scenarios. They do it by creating a licensing agreement. So in this case, the agreement would grant the licensee the customer, in other words, the right to make a copy of the file for the purposes of saving the information to their hard drive. But this agreement would also spell out that this is really the only acceptable instance for making a copy, with maybe an exception for making a backup for the interest of fair use. That's a possible other clause that could be there. So the license agreement defines how the customer can use the software legally, and the customer has to acknowledge and agree to the license before they make use of the software. Sometimes all they have to do is just make use of the software, and that ends up being an acknowledgment an agreement to the EULA right like they may not have to actually click on a button or anything. It may be that the EULA spells out that by using the software, it intrinsically means the customer has agreed to the terms, and the concept is that all parties are aware of and agreed to these terms of use, and then things can go on their own merry way. One thing to keep in mind is that because of the license issue, what we're talking about is not ownership, right, it's access. That's what the license grants the licensee. It grants them access to whatever it is that's licensed, but they don't own it. The person that or entity that sold it owns it. So even if you have a copy sitting on your computer, you don't own that copy. You're just licensed to access it. That's the foundational idea behind a ULAP. It protects the producer and holds customers accountable for accessing the licensed material in a very specific and approved way. That's a real kicker, isn't it, Because being able to access material means that the producer can actually define the rules that favor them. I mean, they're the only party that's making up these rules. This is not a negociation. It's not a process where collaboratively buyer and seller come together and they heckle and they come to an agreement. This is where the seller gets to dictate all the terms, and they can redefine the rules with little to no warning. They can change the rules after people have already agreed to a different set of rules. That's how we get situations like what's happening with Roku that you as a customer, maybe you've read the whole eula top to bottom, and maybe you're like, there's some stuff in here I don't really like, but overall I can agree to this, and you move forward, and then they change the rules of the agreement on you, and the next thing, you know, because of the nature of you las, you are stuck with an agreement that you no longer really like or or feel is warranted. One example brought up in a book titled The End of Ownership by Aaron Parson Now and Jason Schultz, which I actually purchased for this episode. Great book, by the way, I recommend checking it out. But one case is a pretty infamous one with Amazon and George Orwell's nineteen eighty four. Now, the fact that it involves nineteen eighty four in particular is coincidental, but it's still kind of ironic. So what happened was that you had some people who purchased an ebook copy of the classic dystopian novel nineteen eighty four by George Orwell, which, among other things, warrens of the dangers of authoritarian governments and mass surveillance and the control of information. But then it turned out that the vendor that was selling this ebook over at Amazon didn't actually have legal permission to do that. So what did Amazon do Well, it pulled the digital copy from the people who purchased it, and it then issued a refund. So it meant people would turn on an ebook reader like a Kindle and then suddenly they see that the copy of nineteen eighty four that they had purchased was gone. And again, very ironic. It looks like the control of information. It looks like the thing you bought got reclaimed. And when you think about it, that's pretty wild, right. I mean, if you had bought a copy of a book from a bookstore, like a physical book, you wouldn't expect someone from that bookstore to show up at your home to say, hey, turns out the publisher of that book didn't have the right to publish it, so I'm gonna have to take it back. That would be crazy. And yet due to the nature of digital distribution, this can and did happen with Amazon and nineteen eighty four. So a lot of news outlets really had a field day about this, and I get it. I mean, it's very like poetic and ironic. But Amazon was in a tough place because the vendor did not have the right to sell the book, which meant the rightful parties that could sell the book would have a really good reason to go after Amazon for allowing it to all happen if Amazon didn't do something about it. As a modern eula can be structured to allow for this kind of thing, where a company can reclaim digital material even if you thought you owned it. So another great example would be if you purchased a digital title on a service like a platform. It's one thing to be a subscriber to say Netflix, for example, it's another thing. Let's say that you are on Amazon Prime and you've purchased a digital copy of a movie. Could it be possible for Amazon to revoke that access to that digital title in the future. Absolutely, that could happen. You know, you could purchase a DVD of the movie, and you've got that DVD forever, right until the DVD degrades to a point where you can't use it or you don't have a player that can play it anymore. They could still go obsolete that way, but otherwise you still have access to it digitally. If something were to happen, Amazon could potentially just remove it from your library and now you can't access it anymore. That's a possibilit So the license always has conditions, and if you violate those conditions, then you could lose access to the thing you thought you had purchased. It can be taken away from you, and those conditions can change pretty much at the whim of the company that's behind the thing. And it's kind of like what Darth Vader said to Lando Calrissian, I am altering the deal. Pray I do not alter it any further. This is really an issue with digital media in general, not just because of ULA's So again, I was talking about Netflix and licensing agreements. Well, there are license agreements between Netflix and various studios out there, right, So you have no guarantee that a title that you really like is going to remain on any given streaming service. One day it might be there, and then the next day it could be gone because of some agreement made between the service and the company that owns the rights to that title, and it expired and wasn't renewed. I always think of that Mitchell and Web Look, which is a British comedy sketch show with Rob Web and David Mitchell. I found that on Netflix years ago and fell in love with that series, loved it and one day the series just disappeared. At one point, just the third season disappeared. Seasons one, two, and four were still there, but three went away, and then eventually all of them went away. And then I looked to see where I could get access to it, and I couldn't anywhere in America. There were no legal ways to access the material. I eventually had to purchase the English DVDs and get a region free player so that I could watch the show because I no longer had access to it. And that's just the way it is. You don't own the media. For media that exists on servers, Like on an online video game, a company might choose to shut those servers down in order to reduce costs, and effectively that kills the game. So even if you had purchased a copy of this game at full retail price when it came out, you wouldn't be able to play that game anymore because the servers that existed that allowed you to play that game are now offline. Like that's a real problem, not just for like multiplayer online games, which that's pretty obvious, right. If it's an online game, then if the servers go down, there's no server to log into, you can't play anymore. But there are single player games that, as part of the digital rights management system, require you to contact a specific server that verifies the copy of the game you're playing is a legitimate copy. And if those servers go down, you have a legitimate copy of a single player game that's not an online experience that cannot work anymore because there's no longer a server for it to ping to to verify that your copy is legitimate. This is a real problem. And because you never actually owned a copy of the game, you really just owned a license to access that game under certain conditions, you're kind of stuck. Okay, we've got a ton more stuff to talk about, including an actual court case, but before we get further into that, let's take another quick break to thank our sponsors. All Right, So there's a piece I read for this that I recommend y'all check out. Jason Kobler wrote a piece for Motherboard and it's titled Corporations use end user license agreements to create a parallel legal system, And the title really sums things up pretty nicely. So, in order to secure the protections that the company desires, and in order to force customers into behaviors that ultimately benefit the company. These organizations craft legal agreements that restrict customer rights and allow for practices that aren't otherwise covered by law. The traditional aspects of property law do not apply. Right. We've talked about that, because there are differences between physical and digital types of media. The rights of property ownership you would originally assume would apply to you, they don't apply. Moreover, these agreements can be so long and sometimes filled with jargon that customers are not incentivized to read through it all, so the deck is stacked in favor of the companies. Sometimes you're not even allowed to read an agreement until you've actually gone through the trouble of making the purchase. So it's you can't read before you decide to buy, it's when you buy, and then you are able to access the agreement, So you don't necessarily know what you're getting into until after money has already changed hands. Maybe then you would be able to secure a refund, but with digital property, that's not always a guaranteed, nor is it always easy, right Like, some platforms make it easier than others, but it's not always easy to get a refund. If by the way that you're not able to read the agreement until after you've made a purchase. You are supposed to be able to get a refund because it would be ludicrous otherwise, like you don't know what you're getting into until you've made a purchase. Then you're told too late what the deal is. And if you said, well, I don't accept those terms, you have to be able to get a refund or else what's the point. So Coupler points out more than a few cases in which companies used a EULA to step well beyond just defining terms of ownership or use. So, for example, there's the case of John Deere. That's the company that's best known for making farming equipment like tractors. And we've talked about this company a lot in episodes about the right to repair, which we'll talk about in a second. John Deere is a company that for a very long time has taken steps to restrict how and where farmers can maintain and repair their own equipment. So the company wants to have control over that whole system, much like Apple does with its products, and to that end, the EULA with John Deere equipment included clauses that said farmers were to take their equipment only to official John Deere licensed repair shops. And if you happen to be a farmer who lived a really long way from such a place, and then your tractor broke down, you'd really be up the creek, because you know you've made this agreement not to take your tractor to like the shop down the road that isn't a licensed John Deere repair shop. ULA's were not the only weapon John Deere used to achieve this ecosystem, but it was kind of part of the arsenal. Another example that Kobler sites in his article was for you torrant or however you'd like to pronounce it. So this was or is a bit torrent client, and torrents already have their own shaky history. A lot of people have used torrents to trade in pirated material. But this torrent client up the ante back in twenty fifteen when users were prompted to accept an agreement before actually using the service. This agreement said that users would allow for the installation of a cryptocurrency minor on their own machines. So if you didn't read the agreement, let's say you signed up to the U torrant client. Most folks did not bother to read this agreement. I wouldn't know that you had just agreed to join a cryptocurrency mining operation and that your computer's resources were going to be borrowed for that purpose. And of course you're not mining cryptocurrency for yourself. Instead, your computational resources were going to a much larger operation that benefits the U Torrent folks, which is pretty sneaky, but it was in the ULA. So how do ULA's fare in court? Well, generally speaking, they do pretty darn well. Courts, at least here in the United States, have favored companies more than they have favored customers traditionally. So, for example, there was a court case called Feldman versus Google Incorporated in two thousand and seven. The plaintiff, Feldman, was a lawyer who had purchased ads from Google, and Feldman would owe Google money whenever people would click on one of his ads. But Feldman said he was victim of click fraud, that folks who had no interest in retaining his services were clicking on his ads anyway, and they were driving up costs and costing him money. So Feldman filed a lawsuit in Pennsylvania and said that in part, he wasn't given appropriate notice of Google's clauses before entering into this arrangement. Google moved to have the case tried in Santa Clara County, California, because the EULA actually included a statement that said all disputes were to be resolved there, and the EULA also included passages that provided protection against legal liability in the case of click fraud. Now, Feldman said he did not have appropriate notice to this agreement and that there was no mutual assent upon the agreement and thus it would make it invalid as a contract. But the court found that Feldman had to click the agree button in order to use the service in the first place, and that this amounted to signing a contract agreement, and so Feldman's case was unsuccessful. That he apparently didn't read the agreement first really fell on him on Google. He also had argued that it was invalid because there was no information about pricing in that agreement, but the court found that there were enough indications of the process to determine pricing that not including the pricing itself didn't matter, because what the EULA did have in it was the essentially the formula to calculate what pricing would be, so Feldman ultimately lost this case. Now, some contract lawyers and some other folks have pointed out that traditionally, with most contracts, you do have a negotiation period so you can come to terms that are agreeable to both parties. But in the case of ayula, there is no negotiation. There's no back and forth traditionally, so instead you either agree to the terms or you don't, and if you don't, you don't use the product or service. Those are really your options. There's no way for you to get more favorable terms in most cases. But obviously the other party, the company, can change things and ask you to agree to altered terms of service, which is an unbalanced power dynamic going on here. Now, there are some instances where a court could find in favor of the consumer. For example, let's say a company makes a product with a eula attached to it. The customers are not able to read the eula until after they've purchased the product, so called shrink wrap eula. A customer buys the product, then they're able to read the eula. The customer then objects to the eula and they want to return the product for a refund. If there is no reasonable time frame for them to make such a return, a court could find in favor of the customer because they'd say, like, your EULA doesn't isn't enforceable, because there's no way for the customer to object to the EULA and have it mean anything. If the company does give a reasonable amount of time, let's say that they give you thirty days to make a return. If you object to the ula and if you fail to return it within the thirty days, then the court is probably going to find in favor of the company because they'd say, well, they gave you a reasonable timeframe to request a refund, and if you didn't respond within that timeframe, that's on you. If a customer can make a case that the terms of a EULA are too vague or too complicated for a reasonable person to understand them, then the courts could also find that that particular EULA is unenforceable. So that's one reason a company might be discouraged from obfuscating things with a lot of legal jargon, because it can come back to haunt them if someone bothers to bring a lawsuit against them. Lawsuits are really expensive, though, so unless the customer is really determined to stick it to this company, it's not likely to happen. But if it does happen, the consumer can show, hey, this EULA is purposefully complex and vague. A court might find that particular eula to be unenforceable, but you know that's a long shot. It's such a huge undertaking and it's so expensive. So maybe companies could avoid making things confusing with legal language, but they could still bury consumers in ulas that are thousands of words long, and it might not be complicated or vague. It might just be dull and exhausting. So again, no one really bothers to read them. But if they were to try and challenge them in court, the court might say, well, yeah, it's long and it's boring, but nothing here is vague or complicated, so technically it stands. There are also social changes that are pushing back against some EULAs. I mentioned John Deere earlier. That's a company that's been affected by the recent right to repair movement. Advocates have really pushed for laws that give consumers more control over how they maintain and repair their purchases, and they have pushed back against this closed ecosystem approach used by companies like John Deere and Apple, and there's been progress in several states here in the United States, though it's not really a nationwide trend as of yet. But obviously this is a really big step. You know, getting states to create new legislation that makes certain passages in certain EULAs unenforceable isn't the sort of thing that the average person can really do themselves. It requires much larger movements. So again, when it comes to the average consumer, it often feels like there's not much you can do, and that's usually actually the case. Now. I know I've said a lot of negative stuff about ULA's in this episode, but they do actually serve a purpose. Ulas are needed to cover gaps in intellectual property law, particularly here in the digital space. They aren't all malicious or overbearing, and you could argue that they actually stand as evidence that legislators need to make new property ownership laws that cover the digital space and modern technologies, and that these laws would then supersede EULAs or just make them moot. In fact, a lot of people have argued for this that we need new property laws that would cover things in the digital realm, and that This would really go a long way to solving these issues. But it's really hard to get a body like the US Congress to take up matters of property ownership. It just isn't something that is a super high priority right now, So I wouldn't hold my breath for it anyway. That about sums it up for youula's except for this bit, should you read every EULA before you agree to it? Well, I honestly can't tell you that it would do you much good. You might have a better understanding of what it is you're getting into. I'm not sure that that's a good enough reason. Maybe you would read something that you really object to and you just decide this isn't for me. That's you know, that's legitimate, But goodness knows, if you're like me, you do not have the time to read through a novel's worth of legal language just to be able to play a game or listen to music or use a piece of software. If you do want to be part of that tenth of a percent of people who bother to read any of the ULA at all, go for it. You'll be bucking the trend and showing companies that you mean business. Unless you just hit. I agree at the end, because then they got you. Anyway, that's sort of the purpose and the use of EULA's. It is unfortunate that there are companies that are kind of overstepping their bounds, in my opinion, in order to craft ulas to really restrict consumer rights. It's also unfortunate that the courts typically find in favor of end user license agreements unless it is considered to be unconscionable or too complex or vague. And again, the only way that that even happens is if someone brings a lawsuit to bring it to the court's attention. It's not like courts are evaluating these license agreements before they go out. That doesn't happen. So yeah, it's kind of an unfair landscape and I don't see it changing anytime soon. And yeah, all I can do is set a flea out to all the companies out there not to go bonkers with those terms in ULA's because the more people find out about it, the more ticked off they become, and you start to see movements rise up that could very well bring legal changes that will just completely invalidate those end user license agreements anyway, So I mean, I guess I could say just keep it up because the reckoning is covering, but I think that gets a little too apocalyptic. I hope all of you out there are well, and I'll talk to you again, really soon. Tech Stuff is an iHeartRadio production. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.