Time to kill the EULA? Printer company Lexmark lose supreme court battle

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Time to kill the EULA? Printer company Lexmark lose supreme court battle

A small victory for basic consumer rights this week as the Supreme Court in the USA voted in favour of Impressions Products regarding use of ink cartridges.

If you have bought something legally, most of us would assume we have basic buyer rights such as the right to repair the item or sell it on open markets when we no longer need it. But increasingly restrictive End User License Agreements (EULAs) or anti-tamper product design is a way of curtailing consumer rights.

In the case of Impression Products vs. Lexmark, Impression wanted to refill the ink cartridges it had legally purchased, but Lexmark claimed that using their ink cartridges implied accepting their EULA of the Ink Cartridge, which stated refill was not permitted.

We should respect IP and copyright, but also recognize that when you buy something legally, you own it and shouldn’t be dictated how it is used by a EULA.

The Digital Millennium Copyright Act is designed to protect copyrighted works making breach of a EULA a crime. But who is ensuring that EULAs are actually fair and legitimate?

That is assuming of course that you’ve actually read the EULA? You obviously read every single privacy policy and EULA you interact with, don’t you? The absurdity of EULAs is widely reported including the suggestion that you’d need to take a month off work a year to read all the privacy policies you encounter and the biggest lie on the internet is “I’ve read and agree to the terms and conditions”. We’ve also written in the past about the perils of Click Through EULAs on your network.

As we all know software isn’t just in computers these days. Software is eating the world and underpins the operation of all sorts of services, devices and industries, from your car to the satellites orbiting the earth. In Nebraska farmers are arguing the right to basic repair against John Deere tractors, who argue that the farmers have not bought a tractor, but rather a ‘tractor-as-a-service’ and aren’t allowed to fix it in accordance with the EULA.

This ruling by the Supreme Court is a big boost to ensure the balance between protecting IP and consumer rights is maintained.

Time to kill the EULA? An interesting video on the absurdity of EULAs (heard via BoingBoing) – But be careful – watching the video implies you accept the terms of the video!

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