[sounds]

Pure genius. You can, by the way, offer better licensing to specific companies and unaffiliated individuals -- leaving Hollywood with the unskippable ads, "premium tweets," and all the rest.

Good luck, however, winning in court to enforce your license.

[jerf]

As mentioned on the Wikipedia page for EULAs towards the end [1], the solution is to encase absolutely everything in DRM, making it a DMCA violation to remove the DRM without permission. Then, Google permits everybody except Hollywood to remove it freely.

Oh, and while the DMCA requires DRM to be "effective", that has proved to be a low bar.

More seriously, EULA case results are mixed, and Wikipedia's somewhat sarcastic first sentence of that section as I write this is broadly correct: "The enforceability of an EULA depends on several factors, one of them being the court in which the case is heard." Maybe there's some other legal doctrine about contracts that would knock this out, but it's not immediately obvious to me that this couldn't be done. (Not that it will, of course.)

[1]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/End-user_license_agreement#Enfo...

[nitrogen]

Oh, and while the DMCA requires DRM to be "effective", that has proved to be a low bar.

I think the "effective" in "No person shall circumvent a technological measure that effectively controls access to a work protected under this title."[0] probably means something more like "has the intended effect of" rather than "does a good job at."

[0] http://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/html/uscode17/usc_sec_17_0...

[aaronklein]

But what if by losing, the court invalidates all of Hollywood's ridiculous licensing ploys as well? That would be winning by losing. :)

[dredmorbius]

That's the legal ju-jitsu performed by the GNU GPL and related copyleft licenses.

The stronger the anti-misappropriation measures of copyright law, the stronger the sharing (and compulsory re-licensing) provisions of the GPL.

Playing other legal regimens against themselves in a similar fashion is a creative and often effective strategy.

[ajuc]

Brilliant, but they will just use pirated versions. Or regular versions.

[Silhouette]

That's fine, as long as they don't mind having their entire studio's Internet access cut off if any three people who ever wrote a piece of software each allege that someone from the studio downloaded that software illegally, based on the fact that at least one IP address that was allocated to the studio's domain at the time was observed downloading a file that contained the unique identifying mark "int main() {". Also, each developer who agrees to do this automatically gets $150,000 in statutory damages for every file containing that mark that anyone from any studio IP address ever downloaded.

[Vivtek]

I'm liking this plan better and better.