Posted by Harlan Messinger on 09/12/06 15:25

Jukka K. Korpela wrote:
> Harlan Messinger <hmessinger.removethis@comcast.net> scripsit:
>
>> With a contract printed on paper, you also can't prove that the person
>> who signs it has read it,
>
> There's no need for proving that,

Right, so in the analogous web-based situation, someone running a web
site ought not to have the initial burden of proving that the user read
the EULA.

> and this has nothing to do with the
> discussion at hand, still less HTML.

How does an analogy relating to whether a person read or didn't read a
contract not have anything to do with a discussion on whether a person
did or didn't read a contract?

>> If someone encountering a EULA chooses to engineer a hack to get
>> around reading it,
>
> then someone else can quite innocently follow a link and arrive at a
> page without seeing any reference to any contract, as I wrote.

And the company's web logs will show the the EULA was never requested by
the user. (It seems to me a hack is easily prevented, by inserting a
random string into a hidden INPUT tag [ObHTML] and expecting to receive
that same string from the same IP to which it was sent and/or from
within the same user session.)

Anyway, as with any contract, the answer to the question of whether a
EULA would be binding if a person did agree to it doesn't rely on the
fact that it certainly wouldn't be binding if it had never been
presented to the person.

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