Publicity Through Wacky EULA

Too Much Free Time

from the ditch-the-lawyer-speak dept

We’ve written in the past about some surprises people might find if they actually read the end user license agreements that come with software. Many of the surprises are “bad,” such as Sony telling you that you must delete all your music should you ever go bankrupt or Qwest telling you they can charge you $5 per email should your computer get infected and spams anyone. However, others are more interesting, such as Microsoft offering $5 if their software screws up your computer (sort of the opposite of the Qwest deal) or (my favorite), PC Pitstop’s promise to pay $1,000 to the first person who actually read their EULA (in part, to prove that no one reads EULAs). They paid it out, but it took four months and 3,000 downloads until anyone claimed the prize. Another organization has now been “outed” for having a somewhat amusing EULA, where it’s clear no lawyers were used in creating the text. Digg points us to a screenshot of the EULA that states: “What’s (sic) the hell, we know you are going to crack the screensaver anyway, so we aren’t going to bitch about it.” In the comments on Digg, someone notes that the same programmers have the following statement on their about page: “We don’t bitch about piracy. If somebody cracks our games it means they were popular and good enough for hackers to spend their time on our games.” The interesting part here, really, is that this sort of reasonable honesty is now going to get those programmers a lot more publicity, downloads and sales (of the products they do charge for).