EULA has no specific meaning in industry. It's been used for so many different kinds of terms, in so many different contexts, that it's lost nearly all meaning. Like "OEM".
> The most defining characteristic of a EULA is usually the "licensed but not sold" part.
Public licenses for software, say MIT or BSD, also arguably license, rather than sell. But they still include disclaimers of warranties, like merchantability and fitness for particular purpose, implied by the Uniform Commercial Code, which governs contracts. Huh?
At least under the US law I've seen, from Jacobsen to Hancom, there's no hard, meaningful legal distinction between contract and license, as some activists theorized early on. Even when those activists drafted licenses, like the GPLs, that explicitly claimed to be licenses and not contracts, they still included contract-like disclaimers and limits on liability.
Realistically, license and contract rules coexist and overlap. How do we interpret license terms? By rules of contract construction. What claims do plaintiffs make for violations? Copyright infringement and breach of contract. What makes a license irrevocable without consideration? Promissory estoppel, a contract doctrine.
> The most defining characteristic of a EULA is usually the "licensed but not sold" part.
Public licenses for software, say MIT or BSD, also arguably license, rather than sell. But they still include disclaimers of warranties, like merchantability and fitness for particular purpose, implied by the Uniform Commercial Code, which governs contracts. Huh?
At least under the US law I've seen, from Jacobsen to Hancom, there's no hard, meaningful legal distinction between contract and license, as some activists theorized early on. Even when those activists drafted licenses, like the GPLs, that explicitly claimed to be licenses and not contracts, they still included contract-like disclaimers and limits on liability.
Realistically, license and contract rules coexist and overlap. How do we interpret license terms? By rules of contract construction. What claims do plaintiffs make for violations? Copyright infringement and breach of contract. What makes a license irrevocable without consideration? Promissory estoppel, a contract doctrine.