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a binding agreement just by following a link, stepping into a store,
buying a product, or receiving an email. By standing there, shak-
ing your head, shouting “NO NO NO I DO NOT AGREE,” you
agree to let me come over to your house, clean out your fridge,
wear your underwear, and make some long-distance calls.
If you buy a downloadable movie from Amazon Unbox, you
agree to let them install spyware on your computer, delete any
file they don’t like on your hard drive, and cancel your viewing
privileges for any reason. Of course, it goes without saying that
Amazon reserves the right to modify the agreement at any time.
The worst offenders are people who sell you movies and music.
They’re a close second to people who sell you software, or provide
services over the Internet. There’s a rubric to this — you’re getting
a discount in exchange for signing onto an abusive agreement,
but just try and find the software that
doesn’t
come with one of
these “agreements” — at any price.
For example, Vista, Microsoft’s new operating system, comes
in a rainbow of flavors varying in price from $99 to $399, but
all of them come with the same crummy terms of service, which
state that “you may not work around any technical limitations
in the software,” and that Windows Defender, the bundled anti-
malware program, can delete any program from your hard drive
that Microsoft doesn’t like, even if it breaks your computer.
It’s bad enough when this stuff comes to us through deliber-
ate malice, but it seems that bogus agreements can spread almost
without human intervention. Google any obnoxious term or
phrase from a EULA, and you’ll find that the same phrase appears
in dozens — perhaps thousands — of EULAs around the Internet.
Like snippets of DNA being passed from one virus to another
as they infect the world’s corporations in a pandemic of idiocy,
terms of service are semi-autonomous entities.
Indeed, when rocker Billy Bragg read the fine print on the
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