The Microsoft Passport debacle - originating from the ridiculous terms of use policy document on the Passport site - has reminded us of the dangers that often lurk in the rambling legalese that we seldom read and often agree to in software and on Web sites with the click of a mouse.
[VIDEO]I often use Hotmail as a convenient method of filing stories when away from the office. The copyright for those stories belongs to ITWeb, but according to the policy document that I agreed to by default, and since Hotmail is authenticated through the Passport service, this means that Microsoft can use my stories - even sell or give them away to my competition, with my name attached - at will. I doubt that it would ever act on the option, but the fact that it has the audacity to claim rights to work, patents and copyright that doesn`t belong to the company is an insult.
This isn`t the first software company to claim such ludicrous rights to its users` work.
Sun Microsystems buried a clause deep in its exceptionally complex Java licence agreement a few years ago, stating that all work created in Java is, legally, Sun`s property. It took me two days of rummaging through the thousands of lines of legalese to find the clause, and I haven`t had the time or energy to touch the documents again, so I`m not sure if it is still there.
Once again, I doubt that it would ever use the clause to pull code from its customers` developments, but there is a basic injustice in the licensing model.
Look before you leap
Every day we agree to terms and conditions in software and on Web sites by simply clicking the "I Agree" button. How often do we study what we click on? When we sign our John Hancock on a document, we tend to give it a high degree of scrutiny. We read the small print. We think before we sign.
There is a basic injustice in the licensing model.
Jason Norwood-Young, Technology editor, ITWeb
The amount of agreements that we adhere to through the PC is so vast that we have become anesthetised to them. We barely register their presence - they are merely another screen-full of text between you and your work, which must be clicked through as fast as possible.
If we were to read every privacy document, terms of use, and licensing agreement of every site we visited and every software package that we used, we would become seriously unproductive. If we don`t, however, we can end up signing the rights to all of our life`s work over to some nefarious company and its equally nefarious lawyers.
I`m not sure if these companies just put the copyright-claiming clauses in to cover themselves in the event of some corporate disaster, or if they have comedians as lawyers. They are assuming the idiocy of the general public to get away with those clauses.
I probably read every one in 100 or so agreements that I implicitly or explicitly agree to. Microsoft has proved that I am a sucker for my lack of due diligence. If one considers how many users Hotmail has, and that the privacy document issue was only picked up now, then there are a lot of suckers like me out there.
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