[horser4dish]

I think the biggest reason that nobody reads these is because of the sheer size of EULA documents. They're dense paragraphs upon paragraphs of legal text. I don't think that it's the legalese that scares people away, but the fact that page numbers in the double digits is the norm.

I've found that reading and understanding is not particularly difficult, but when I install iTunes/Windows/whatnot, it's because I want to use that software. I'm sure a lot of people agree that they don't want to spend twenty, thirty minutes reading through a license that says approximately the same thing every other EULA has said before.

A shortened summary in plain English (or language of your choice, I suppose) would be best, but as the article points out, that would open them up to all of the legal holes that those 56 pages were busy closing. Creative Commons' "human-readable" licenses (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/, compared to http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/legalcode) are a good idea and one that I support, but as far as I know they haven't been tested in court, which makes it difficult for a company with large amounts of money at stake to embrace that.

[steevdave]

When Paypal updates their EULA and various other policies I get an email about it and I can't remember if it's the link or in the email itself but it has a summary of what has changed since the last one.

[wccrawford]

Of course, Apple's EULA hasn't been tested in court, either, so it's hardly any better if that's the criteria.

[horser4dish]

Last time I looked over it (I don't actually use iTunes anymore), a lot of the EULA was devoted to the content and how you can't pirate it, and so on. That seems to me to be the very things that the RIAA and other groups sue over. So even though you are correct, Apple's specific terms of use have not been tested, the idea (and who knows, possibly wording as well) behind it has been successfully used in court by the owners of the licensed materials.

[bugsy]

I am able to buy CDs without signing any contract at all. So it appears that a contract is not necessary for copyright infringement to still be illegal and the contracts are completely unnecessary for the stated purpose of "preventing piracy", which is already illegal, even without a contract.