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Comment by jo909 | Hacker News Reader

This is the relevant change in the EULA you need to accept when downloading (installing?) the GeForce driver. The article is weirdly translated, this is apparently a global NVIDIA thing and not specific to "NVIDIA Japan".

> No Datacenter Deployment. The SOFTWARE is not licensed for datacenter deployment, except that blockchain processing in a datacenter is permitted.

Edit: http://www.nvidia.com/content/DriverDownload-March2009/licen... and https://www.geforce.com/drivers/license/geforce

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I'm not a legal expert and don't understand EULAs at all. I expected a "Datacenter" to be defined at some point but I didn't see a definition in the EULA.

How should one interpret this? Is a research cluster a datacenter? How about a rack of a few dozen machines I built by hand? I've been in university research groups that had both options.

Somewhat maddening to have a single line in the EULA that's so open to interpretation.

Undefined terms like that speak to the weakness of the EULA as an enforceable contract.

When you're not a legal expert and you feel like you are about to maybe break a term in someone else's license agreement the right avenue is to consult your company or university legal department.

They don't want commercial cloud and bare metal and "machine learning as a service" platforms to be based on GeForce cards. Such a service is either insignificant in it's size, or based in a Datacenter.

I would not stress about this on my own hardware for my personal or company internal use, even if it is a full rack or more in a Datacenter. Nvidia is not going to be able to tell the difference to a rack in my basement.

IANAL, but in the law there's a thing which is called Contra proferentem: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Contra_proferentem Basically, it means that ambiguous terms are interpreted against the contract drafter.

You get that pretty much everywhere that used to be British common law iirc, and it’s why contracts frequently define seemingly minor and silly terms, ones which are obvious such as “the undersigned“ and all manner of the seemingly banal. In essence the contract is first and foremost agreeing on the same language, to express a commitment which ideally all parties are fully cognizant of.

Edit: spelling

Also there is no punitive damages in U.K. law. So what’s the worst that could happen? Would you put them back in the position they would have been had the contract not existed, so give the cards back plus a contribution towards depreciation? Would be interesting if someone with legal knowledge could chime in.

They could potentially claim damages for the difference in price between the GeForce and the equivalent Tesla, using the argument that using the GeForce in a DC has cost them that amount in lost revenue.

Of course, a counterclaim for existing owners would be that the product they purchased was licensed for DC usage at time the contract was entered into, and so the original rights cannot be unilaterally revoked without consent.

What if you write your own block chain where the POW is "do a deep learning task"?

This is the concept behind openmined.org - the “miners” are rewarded for improving the gradient (the data is anonymised).

courts aren't (yet?) ruled by machines; you'll have a hard time arguing this to an actual human being

And an actual human judge is not going to sympathize with a have your cake and eat it too EULA like nvidias especially if the competitor is offering a product that is more efficient for the consumer

I might be wrong, but doesn't modern Windows just silently installs these from windows update, without EULA or user consent?

If this is just a software licensing change maybe the OSS stuff will gain momentum!

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