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Legal Issues

by Mike Masnick

Tue, Oct 22nd 2002 12:45pm





Is Microsoft Licensing Forcing Banks To Break The Law?

from the when-laws-and-EULAs-collide dept

Oops. It appears that any bank that uses Microsoft operating systems may be breaking the law. Someone who actually (oh my!) read the fine print on the Microsoft EULA has discovered it requires users who enable the "auto update" feature to allow Microsoft access to information on the system - which violates a law, soon to go into effect, not allowing access by third parties to information without the consent of whoever's data it is. Of course, there is a pretty simple solution (besides ditching Microsoft altogether) which is not to use the auto-update feature. Anyway, honestly, this seems like much more of a nitpick on bad language choices by Microsoft's lawyers in not clearly defining what they mean by allowing "access to information" on the system.

2 Comments | Leave a Comment..


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  1.  

    Lawyers don't make bad word choices

    identicon
    Steve Snyder, Oct 22nd, 2002 @ 3:38pm

    Unless they're bad lawyers (and Microsoft does not have bad lawyers) they didn't make bad word choices. The absolute essence of what lawyers do is to consider every word of a document and what it's ramifications are. And it's not like this is one exception that slipped through, the fact of the matter is Microsoft documents and EULAs are constantly trying to take big things little by little without us noticing. Do I think that Microsoft plans on using the things you agree in the EULA to look over every file on your hard drive? Of course not, but time and again they show that they want to be able to do things even if they never actually do them.

    [ reply to this | link to this | view in thread ]

  2.  

    Pharma & Healthcare companies have same issue...

    identicon
    2Lazy2Register, Oct 23rd, 2002 @ 6:16am

    ... due to new HIPAA regulations. Most are apparently are just choosing to ignore it.

    [ reply to this | link to this | view in thread ]


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