Re: Consideration in a Shrinkwrap Contract

At 9:11 AM -0400 10/25/00, Peter D. Junger wrote:
>Leaving aside the possibility of circumventing whatever program
>they use to ``force you to affirm acceptance,'' the result may well
>be an enforceable agreement against the person who is forced to
>accept. But that person can still sell (or give away or abandon) his
>copy of the software, can't he? And the purchaser is not going to
>be bound by the agreement, now is he? So some of the discussion will
>still be relevant, unless you are assuming that one will run the software
>on the vendor's server rather than on the vendee's own machine, and that
>the vendee will not have a copy.
>
>It seems to me that there is another reason why this discussion is likely
>to be irrelevant. In the new future no rational person is going to purchase
>unfree commodity software, but rather only open source software.
>
>And there is another reason that will take affect someday: the courts will
>figure out, as the First Circuit actually did in Lotus v. Borland, that
>functioning computer programs are processes and that 17 U.S.C. 102(b)
>means what it says.

Establishing as a matter of law that there is after all such a thing as a free lunch. Dream on.

John Noble Received on Thu Oct 26 2000 - 05:26:09 GMT