Cory Doctorow on the license for Amazon Unbox

[mdlbear]

Boing Boing: Amazon Unbox to customers: Eat shit and die

Amazon's new video-on-demand store may sound like a good idea, but once you take a look at the "agreement" you enter into by giving them your money, that changes. The Amazon terms-of-service are among the worst I've ever seen, a document through which you surrender your rights to privacy, integrity of your personal data, and control over your computer, in exchange for a chance to pay near-retail cost to watch Police Academy n-1. As Ben Franklin might have said: "They that can give up general purpose computers for the sake of a little eye candy deserve neither computers nor eye candy."

Comments

[ravan.livejournal.com]

*sigh* They basically put all of that shit in to get the studios let them "sell" and rent online. It's the MPAA dream contract, written by MPAA sharks, and probably handed to Amazon legal with a "If you want to 'sell' movie downloads, you can only do it with these terms."

I think it was stupid, but since they are a public company, if someone else did it first, the stockholders would whine.

And the crap only works on windows anyway.