A blogging first?
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December 6th, 2004 at 12:50 pm
I don’t think this guy has read read any other software EULA’s. H&R Block’s is actually one of the better ones – they take a small amount of responsibility for the software actually calculating your taxes correctly. Most software licenses:
1) Disclaim merchantibility, fitness, non-infringement, etc. That is, the only thing they’ll guarantee is that if the disk itself is bad, they’ll replace it – unless they got busted for stealing the program in the first place.
2) Allow you to install it on just one machine at a time.
3) You don’t actually own the software, but are just renting it for an indefinite period. That is, you can’t resell it, modify it, or try to figure out how it works.
4) They may also forbid you from testing the program’s performance versus other competing programs and from publishing the results of such testing. In other words, you might have signed away the right of even putting a critical review onto your blog when you clicked through the EULA.
December 6th, 2004 at 1:22 pm
I doubt it’s a first – everything’s been fisked, even the Bill of Rights – but I don’t think this guy (Mark) has read the blog entry he is commenting on, unless following a link to post a substantially identical comment there counts as “reading.” If he had actually read the entry he is commenting on, he would know that H&R Block takes no responsibility for the software doing anything at all. Or, if you prefer, they do take up to $10,000 of responsibility for tax penalties caused by their software, unless the penalties arise for “any reason.”
Also, had he read for comprehension rather than for something to pounce on, he would also know that this particular EULA disclaims all the same warranties he mentions (merchantability, fitness, non-infringement, etc.), and more. They even go so far off the deep end as to disclaim the common law warranty of quiet enjoyment, which relates to landlord tenant relationships, not software.
December 6th, 2004 at 4:27 pm
I prefer my enjoyment nice and loud, thank you.
December 6th, 2004 at 4:41 pm
Well, I did a bit of a fisk of Kazaa’s EULA last year here.
December 7th, 2004 at 11:48 am
We have the simplest EULA in the industry:
Fuck you. Pay me.
December 7th, 2004 at 2:37 pm
XLRQ: Mainly I was wondering why you pounced on this particular EULA when it’s pretty hard to find any that aren’t at least as objectionable. Haven’t you ever read the EULA for Microsoft Windows?
And there are conceivable circumstances where one could collect $10,000 from H&R Block. Not very likely, but possible. That’s $10,000 more than anyone is ever going to get out of Microsoft for all their crashes and security holes…
December 7th, 2004 at 3:13 pm
Mark, you’re just wrong. Most EULAs are bad, but most are not as bad as this one, particularly when considering what this product is for. So what if Windoze doesn’t pretend to guarantee against $10,000 worth of penalties from the IRS, only to snatch that guarantee right back? It doesn’t matter, because that OS isn’t designed for activities that might land you with these fines in the first place. Tax software, by contrast, is designed to do one thing, and one thing only. It’s not too much to ask that they do it right.
Rather than compare apples to mangos and Block to Microsoft, why not compare the TaxCut EULA to that of its chief competitor, TurboTax? Having done so myself, I can assure you that while the TurboTax EULA is far from perfect, it’s an order of magnitude more favorable than TaxCut’s. Most importantly – and this is the only reason I bothered to look at the EULA to begin with – the TurboTax EULA expressly authorizes me to do what the TaxCut EULA prohibits: installing it on as many of my own friggin’ computers as I damned well please.
December 7th, 2004 at 3:16 pm
One more thing: the only “conceivable circumstances” where one could collect $10,000 from H&R Block would be if a court voided at least part of the EULA. Of course, Block could get hit for a lot more than that if the court voided the whole thing.