Obviously this will vary by manufacturer and feature, and it's getting harder as time goes on to remove this shit from your vehicle.
Am I wrong?
I guess it becomes their word against... well, nothing, you don't know what they did or didn't do.
For those who care enough to reject EULAs, they should take a few videos of rejecting the license and hopefully that would be enough to shift the onus to the manufacturer, who, as you said, has next to nothing.
I think consent dialogs are one of the closest things to Newspeak that exist. In any spoken language, new words can be coined to express a desired meaning. In consent dialogs, there is no longer "Accept" and "Decline", instead there is "Accept" and "Ask me later". When presented with an upsell, the choices are not "Yes" and "No", but "Yes, sign me up!" and "No, I don't want to save money."
This cuts both ways. If the user can show one case of their rejecting the EULA without it being logged, they can then make the claim--correctly or not--that they repeatedly rejected it. If the car refuses to work without the EULA being accepted or rejected, proof of its movement would be sufficient to show repeated rejection.
More pointedly, willfully hiding information like this could backfire massively with the courts or law enforcement.
void handleEula()
{
auto eulaAccepted = readEulaAcceptedFile();
if (!eulaAccepted)
eulaAccepted = promptForEulaAcceptance();
writeEulaFile(eulaAccepted);
}
> If the car refuses to work without the EULA being accepted or rejected, proof of its movement would be sufficient to show repeated rejection.
If the car refuses to work without the EULA being accepted then it wouldn't move. If some functionality was enabled or disabled by accepting the EULA then you would have to show that the functionality was never enabled based on secondhand sources... which would be difficult. Proving something didn't happen is infinitely more difficult than proving something did. Many systems are not designed to handle that level of introspection.
All I'm saying is that the cute legal theory of "I rejected this N times therefore that one time I accepted it is invalid" falls apart for me when I consider that the user would have to prove they never did something, except that one time. Good luck.
Practices like this increase likelihood that the judge rules the entire agreement null and void for the entire userbase.
It falls apart for you, since you are the person trying to trick every single driver. It won't necessarily fall apart for a judge.
Yet, that doesn't matter - all the user has to demonstrate in court is that rejecting a EULA causes it to come up again in the future, meaning that sooner or later it is going to get accidentally accepted.
Sure, if the lawyers are actually trying to do things legally first and adhering to the letter of the law, I'm sure they're happy to have their efforts challenged. But I have never, ever, in my life encountered a lawyer who worked this way (and I have lawyers in my family, I've been to court, I've personally hired several, blah blah blah). I am not saying they don't know the law, but they use their greater knowledge of the law to their advantage. Their goal isn't transparency, it's submission.
I think we're talking about two different things. Yes, the RIAA was running an intimidation campaign. By and large they didn't care about any particular case.
That's quite different than a plaintiff coming at a car manufacturer over sketchy click-wrap agreements.
Anyway, I don't care enough to comment anymore.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capitol_Records,_Inc._v._Thoma...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sony_BMG_v._Tenenbaum
These were widely covered because most people just settled, and there were high hopes for something putting a damper on the lawsuits... from the page about the second case " It was only the second file-sharing case (after Capitol v. Thomas) to go to verdict in the Recording Industry Association of America's (RIAA) anti-downloading litigation campaign"
So 2 for 2 there were found in favor of the RIAA, for huge damages even after appeal.
More recently, even ISPs are getting hit hard: https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2021/06/1-billion-piracy...
There's a much harder burden of proof for the RIAA when they sue people over simply downloading songs or albums when the user can easily make the case for fair use. I mean, how many albums, 8-tracks, cassettes and CD's did you buy of the same artist and album? I know I did it thousands of times.
The burden gets a lot easier when you can show the person was actively distributing essentially pirated music to other users - propagating what is by legal definition, illegal activity.
As I remember, at least some cases were complete BS. Some people hardly knew what file sharing was.
Particularly us geeky folk often seem to think that you can find a buffer overflow exploit in the literal wording of the law and the judge will have to let you go. That usually isn't how it works (although the odd case where someone successfully exploits the actual verbiage in the law tends to make headlines and make it seem like that is how it works).
Do you have proof they clicked it, and not their kid? Did they intend to consent, or click the button by accident/ spilled coffee on the touchscreen?
How can we trust your code at all, if all users say the rejected the contract multiple times, and you claim they accepted it and you are the one that stands to benefit from their acceptance, maybe you are lying? Maybe your system is unreliable?
Is it even legal to use the user's property - i.e. their car - to disturb their peace? If you were to post them a letter, you do it at your expense, but now you are doing it at their expense, they are paying to electricity and data to display those pixels for your benefit.
> A EULA specifies in detail the rights and restrictions which apply to the use of the software.
> Many EULAs assert extensive liability limitations. Most commonly, an EULA will attempt to hold harmless the software licensor in the event that the software causes damage to the user's computer or data, but some software also proposes limitations on whether the licensor can be held liable for damage that arises through improper use of the software (for example, incorrectly using tax preparation software and incurring penalties as a result).
Quoting from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/End-user_license_agreement