psiasterisk wrote...
How did it even get as far as this, that a company like EA can draw up a contract that can run contrary to established law and make people waive their right to sue?
I´m not an american, but seeing that EA is an american company and even people inside the US seem to be pretty pissed off about this, I have to say: You should reign in the rights of your corporations, my american friends. The US are one of the great countries of the world, don´t let your corporations destroy it.
In the meantime I will, as an additional way of protest to not buying ME3, try to get every game, released with Origin in its current form, banned in my country.
EA's lawyers came up with it, and printed it. That doesn't actually make it binding at all. They're justifying it based on some legal interstate commerce laws, except they've made a number of massive logic errors.
First and foremost is, the burden of proof is upon EA to give evidence that you agreed to the EULA. A computer is not a person, it's entirely possible to claim your roommate installed it, and you weren't aware of the EULA, and that he did not have the legal right to authorize invasive scanning of your data.
Second, anyone under the age of 18 can install it and click through the EULA, and not be bound by it. The parents are free to file whatever lawsuit they see fit, as they did not agree to the EULA, and in fact, I believe there are laws regarding forcing minors to sign contracts with additional fines.
It's non-binding, and extremely illegal, because EA cannot prove who agreed to the EULA and cannot force minors to enter into binding contract.
This will end in very large lawsuits, probably by Friday this week.
And I agree, it's ridiculous that EA was even able to get this far with the EULA...problem is, even if a Clause in a Contract is illegal it stands until challanged in Court. EA (like any large Corporation) has herds of Lawyers at their disposal that are getting paid if they are doing something or just sitting around...the Citizenry-in-general doesn't have that luxury and someone would have to find a Law Firm that smells money to take the case on.
That's not going to be hard for the reasons I outlined above. EA has to prove who signed the contract, which is impossible. Since the scanning includes extremely protected data, this is now a major legal matter. Previously, the EULA's fallback was the federal copyright laws, so even if you couldn't prove who agreed to a EULA, you could just lay claim to copyright violations if you did anything wrong with it.
This exceeds it, it's now invasive, and they've no fallback. A lawfirm will pick this up quickly.
Based on my experiments with it, it's just getting lists of directory entries in Program Data, regardless of the program. For instance, on my system, I get a bunch entries in Process Monitor for Norton files and directories. I see nothing to indicate it's storing any of that information in any file of its own, nor is it sending all that much data over the network. Certainly not enough to be transmitting your tax records.
1. Irrelevant. Unless you can demonstrate a need for it to even be looking at the program files directory? I'm pretty sure the software would function just fine without scanning the entire program files directory. Everyone else to date has managed to write software that doesn't need to scan the whole directory.
2. Conjecture, it's scanning the directory and composing a list of files, it's building a map of your installed programs. Once it has that map, reading the files is trivial.
3. Further conjecture. It doesn't need to store it in files of it's own. It can store it in main memory and upload it, the entire process can easily be fully memory based.
Seriously dude, do you have any valid rationale for why it needs to map out your program files directory? Any reason why it needs to be scanning things in it?
Because honestly, in the 30 years of video gaming history, there's been only 1 game in that time that ever needed to do that, and that was a game that placed you in a "Virtual world of your own computer".
I'm pretty sure Battlefield 3 doesn't have such a map, so I'm pretty confident there's no need for them to be scanning everything in the directory where nearly all of your private, personal, and in many cases very stringently legally protected data resides.
Ce sujet est fermé
)
Retour en haut
confusing the whole world again.
