Two things that I believe:

  • If you buy something, it should be yours – whoever you bought it from shouldn’t get to decide how you use it.
  • Legal documents like licences or waivers where the vast majority of users don’t push back on them (whether via renegotiation or via declining to use whatever the document relates to) usually reflect an inappropriate power imbalance.

I’m not completely unsympathetic to the contrary points of view here. Digital goods by their nature allow copying, and if “do with as you want” includes copying them arbitrarily, then the system breaks down. And I’m somewhat sympathetic to people wanting to provide a service but to not be opening themselves up to arbitrary lawsuit losses if something is perceived as going wrong, and so wanting to get some words in place to try to mitigate that. But still: clickthrough licenses suck, and I really don’t like showing up somewhere (a doctor’s office, a new job) and being asked to sign away rights before I can do what I thought we’d agreed to.

 

This is just a vent post, and a very ill-informed one at that; I certainly don’t have any great ideas about what to do about this. I can’t imagine thout our current legal regime is ideal in this regard: maybe restrict the number of situations where licenses / waivers / etc. are permitted, restrict the generality of those documents in most situations where they are used (maybe have some standard options to choose from), improve the guardrails around lawsuits to mitigate the issues that waivers are trying to solve. But I don’t pretend to know exactly what that would look like.

And I am worried that putting too many guardrails in place would chose off some good outcomes, too. So definitely have situations where experimentation is still allowed. I just want those situations to be ones in which there aren’t big power imbalances…

 

A few other random notes:

  • It really annoys me that web pages can (if I’m understanding correctly) put licenses on their content that you’re considered to have accepted just by looking at the web page. The mathematician in me thinks that there should be a symmetric vulnerability: add a header to my browser request imposing my licensing terms, and if the web server sends me the response, then they’re considered to have agreed to my terms. Feels like something that wouldn’t work in practice. (Hmm, maybe I’m overstating how bad the situation is – poking around, the Browsewrap Wikipedia page doesn’t make it seem quite so much worse than standard clickthrough licenses. Which are, to be sure, already bad!)

  • This is mostly something where I think corporations, especially large corporations, abuse the situation, but my opposition to this sort of behavior isn’t all based on that. (Aspects of the leftist discourse on AI are one of the annoyances that led to this post.)

  • These complaints all apply 100% to HOA rules. (And, in some circumstances, to the existence of HOAs at all.)

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