The Lawyers Look at Windows Vista

Many of us pretend to be able to understand and analyze the terms that Microsoft (and let's be fair, every other software company) inserts into its EULAs, or end user license agreements. But some of that language is so thick that laypeople can barely make heads or tails of it. What does the Vista EULA really say? Well, real lawyers put it into human terms for you in this BBC article.

Want to know what you might need to worry about? A lot, starting with what the BBC terms "unprecedented loss of consumer control over [your] own PCs."

How about some details?

Here are some of the provisions in Vista:

• Regular check-ups via the Internet on whether your software is legitimate (this began with XP and continues here).
• Product activation that ties that copy of Vista to a particular PC (another Windows regular feature).
• Periodic "re-validation" at Microsoft's whim (something which began with certain Windows Update procedures in XP).
• Limits on copying or transferring the software. You can make only one backup copy, for example.
• The new Windows Defender scans for malware... but Microsoft determines what constitutes malware, and will automatically remove software it deeps a "high" or "severe" threat.
• Unhappy? "You may not work around any technical limitations in the software."

The big one can be found at the bottom of the story: Windows Vista intentionally degrades picture quality of high-definition DVDs when played on virtually all monitors. The story points out that you actually pay more for Vista because of this, as Vista eats up computing resources by checking 30 times every second that the "premium content" is not being "attacked." That requires higher-end hardware and costs money for programming services.

Microsoft says this is required by movie studios if you want those movies to play at all. Huh. Well, I guess it's all there in the fine print.