Developers speak: The Ouya, four months later

[jonbonazza]

FALSE.
No EULA is enforceable unless it is read and agreed to before the point of sale.
You buy a book. You don't get the rights to re-distribute or modify and distribute the story contained therein. You don't get the right to write your own stories based on characters contained therein. But you do own the book. Same with software.

Um. No. When you buy a copy of MS windows, you do not agree to the EULA at the point of sale. You agree to it on installation. You do NOT own MS Windows. You LICENSE MS Windows. Same goes for any software.

[xAD]

90%+ of any EULA is basic legal statements that don't need to be "agreed" to one way or the other, they are just restatements of copy rights and legal liabilities.
Any restriction on your use beyond that is unenforceable unless agreed to before sale. You cannot modify a contract of sale after the fact. It's not complicated law.

When you buy a copy of MS Windows, you own that copy of MS Windows. You do not own MS Windows. You own that copy of MS Windows. MS cannot come and take it away. MS cannot tell you what you can and cannot do with it (aside from things that interfere with copy rights like distributing copies, etc). It is just like owning a book.

(and before you say "MS can take it away", "activation" yadda yadda - that sort of thing is technically illegal on MS's part. They know nobody is going to do anything about it, though, because the limit to your recompense is the purchase price, and nobody's going to spend thousands minimum on court fees and lawyers to get back $300 from MS. And it's doubtful people will go without the most-used OS, so it becomes a sad fact of life. That doesn't make it legal or right, though.)

[jonbonazza]

90%+ of any EULA is basic legal statements that don't need to be "agreed" to one way or the other, they are just restatements of copy rights and legal liabilities.
Any restriction on your use beyond that is unenforceable unless agreed to before sale. You cannot modify a contract of sale after the fact. It's not complicated law.

When you buy a copy of MS Windows, you own that copy of MS Windows. You do not own MS Windows. You own that copy of MS Windows. MS cannot come and take it away. MS cannot tell you what you can and cannot do with it (aside from things that interfere with copy rights like distributing copies, etc). It is just like owning a book.

(and before you say "MS can take it away", "activation" yadda yadda - that sort of thing is technically illegal on MS's part. They know nobody is going to do anything about it, though, because the limit to your recompense is the purchase price, and nobody's going to spend thousands minimum on court fees and lawyers to get back $300 from MS. And it's doubtful people will go without the most-used OS, so it becomes a sad fact of life. That doesn't make it legal or right, though.)

Dude... do you even know what EULA stands for? It stands for End User LICENSE AGREEMENT. My job is a software engineer. I get paid to do this stuff. You do not OWN your copy. You LICENSE it. If you have ever read the windows EULA, you would realize this. In fact. It explicitly states that Microsoft reserves every right to remove your license in their own discretion.

EDIT: As proof. Here is the relevant text from the license agreements of all 3 forms of windows:

[quote]
OEM

The software is licensed, not sold. Under this agreement, we grant you the right to install and run one copy only on the computer with which you acquired the software (the licensed computer)...

RETAIL UPGRADE

We do not sell our software or your copy of it – we only license it. Under our license, we grant you the right to install and run that one copy on one computer (the licensed computer), for use by one person at a time, but only if you comply with all the terms of this agreement. Typically, this means you can install one copy of the software on a personal computer and then you can use the software on that computer.

PERSONAL USE LICENSE (SYSTEM BUILDER) FOR WINDOWS 8 PRO

We do not sell our software or your copy of it – we only license it.Under our license, we grant you the right to install and run that one copy on one computer (the licensed computer) as the operating system on a computer that you build for your personal use, or as an additional operating system running on a local virtual machine or a separate partition, subject to the restrictions outlined under “Are there things I’m not allowed to do with the software?”
[quote]

[Schizophretard]

I find it entertaining that Microsoft uses the word "your" to clarify which of their copies you do not own. It should say,"We do not sell our software or our copy of it – we only license it."

[zeha]

@ jonbonazza: As far as I know, those EULAs are not really valid in all parts of the world. There might be a lot of text inside, but it's not neccesarily applicable.

[RiotingSpectre]

The topic we're currently discussing had stemmed from something related to unrelated via clarification on certain points. Let's start going on-topic again.