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Legality of Chen's Products
Message
From
04/11/2018 12:49:56
Walter Meester
HoogkarspelNetherlands
 
 
To
04/11/2018 03:19:53
General information
Forum:
Business
Category:
Contracts & agreements
Miscellaneous
Thread ID:
01662875
Message ID:
01663137
Views:
54
>>>Chen's product is being used by people in the U.S. His product may be legal in China (no certainty there), but it is not legal here.
>>
>>How would you know? Are you a lawyer? These issues cannot be read from an EULA.
>
>Walter, from recent personal experience I can tell you that a EULA is a legally binding and enforceable agreement in South Africa. I know this for sure because we have just recently sought expert legal advice on this topic for a EULA we needed to implement in our software and websites for some changes coming in SA legislation. Do not confuse EULA with the law like Thierry seems to do. The EULA is not the law or a law. It is a commercial agreement which can, depending on jurisdiction, be enforced by the law of that jurisdiction. Obviously clauses in any agreement, electronic or otherwise, cannot be enforced if they contravene the laws of the jurisdiction in which the agreement is designed to be enforced i.e. you cannot compel a person to do something by agreement / contract that is illegal.

Indeed my point, the legal enforcement and the classification of an EULA as a contract is depended on the local laws.And the fact that in the vast majority of countries there is not a clear picture that they generally are enforceable.

>Furthermore, recent legislation throughout Europe, the General Data Protection Regulation GDPR which for sure you know about, is all agreed to via EULA on websites for example. In fact, just clicking a simple button with a short message saying "you agree to us using cookies and your information" without even displaying a full text EULA seems to be sufficient to get a user's agreement to the websites terms and conditions. So these electronic agreements which are agreed to with a click presumably have some basis to be defended and enforced in Europe too, at least it seems so to me ...

AFAIK, and correct me if I'm wrong, the GDPR is about protecting data belonging to the user and in reality has noting (or at least very little) to do with whether EULAs are legal contracts.
The problem of EULAs begin when they are considered contracts of adhesion, a "take it or leave it" type of contract. where the EULA is not viewable and the user is not made aware of it before the purchase. For example, this renders an EULA completely void in Germany in the vast majority of cases.

Apparently you have been told that an EULA is legally binding, and that is what an EULA and the specialised companies pretend to, but in fact there are so few cases (also in the UK) actually brought to court that its doubtful it will stand up in court depending on when and how its presented to the user and what the actual contents says. Experts have many doubt as there a significant number of problems with them. From what I gather, EULAs are generally not enforceable in Germany and Spain. Its difficult to get any information from other countries because it seems like to be a topic vendors don't want to burn their fingers on. There are not many cases hold in court to draw any conclusion.



More reading (read the comments): https://blog.codinghorror.com/does-anyone-actually-read-software-eulas/
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