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MySpace user agreement, he discovered that it appeared that site
owner Rupert Murdoch was laying claim to copyrights in every
song uploaded to the site, in a silent, sinister land-grab that
turned the media baron into the world’s most prolific and indis-
criminate hoarder of garage-band tunes.
However, the EULA that got Bragg upset wasn’t a Murdoch
innovation — it dates back to the earliest days of the service.
It seems to have been posted at a time when the garage entre-
preneurs who built MySpace were in no position to hire pricey
counsel — something borne out by the fact that the old MySpace
EULA appears nearly verbatim on many other services around
the Internet. It’s not going out very far on a limb to speculate
that MySpace’s founders merely copied a EULA they found some-
where else, without even reading it, and that when Murdoch’s
due diligence attorneys were preparing to give these lucky fellows
$600,000,000, they couldn’t be bothered to read the terms of ser-
vice anyway.
In their defense, EULAese is so mind-numbingly boring that
it’s a kind of torture to read these things. You can hardly blame
them.
But it does raise the question — why are we playing host to
these infectious agents? If they’re not read by customers
or
com-
panies, why bother with them?
If you wanted to really be careful about this stuff, you’d pro-
hibit every employee at your office from clicking on any link,
installing any program, creating accounts, signing for parcels
— even doing a run to Best Buy for some CD blanks, have you
seen
the fine-print on their credit card slips? After all, these people are
entering into “agreements” on behalf of their employer — agree-
ments to allow spyware onto your network, to not “work around
any technical limitations in their software,” to let malicious soft-
ware delete arbitrary files from their systems.
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