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> Why? What if the "desired purpose" (desired by the company) is illegal? My comment was badly worded. What I meant was that, if the license's meaning was disp

> Why? What if the "desired purpose" (desired by the company) is illegal? My comment was badly worded. What I meant was that, if the license's meaning was disputed in court, the court should agree that it meant what the company intended for it to mean. And that is one purpose of unclear legalese in TOS. (Deliberate obfuscation, and increasing lawyers' fees, are also purposes, but not the only ones.) > What the Data Protection agency is doing here, is saying that what WhatsApp/Facebook are doing is illegal. It's saying WhatsApp didn't get the user's consent in a legal way. It is not saying that what WhatsApp wanted consent to is itself inherently illegal. My comment was about the general problem of meaningful agreement to online click-through contracts. > The GPL is a copyright licence so doesn't require consent. It's a different type of "licence" from most ToS's. It's the same in the relevant respect: that to use the GPLed software in certain ways, e.g. to install copies of it on many computers (which counts as copying), you have to do certain things outlined in the license. And since copyright law by default forbids such actions, the user has to read the license to know they can do it.

rmc 10y ago
> What I meant was that, if the license's meaning was disputed in court, the court should agree that it meant what the company intended for it to mean. And my point is that sometimes what the company intends/wants is illegal. And the courts should For example, a company might want employees to sign away rights to minimum wage. We can clearly see what the company intends in that contract, but the courts will not agree with it. "Contracts are sacred and unbreakable" is an ethical/legal stance associated with libertarianism, and it is not what many countries follow.
- danarmak 10y ago
  Yes, of course, some things are illegal and cannot be agreed to in contracts. I'm not saying contracts should be sacred. I'm saying the contract's meaning should be as clear as possible so courts will agree the license meant what the company intended it to mean. The court can still say the license is illegal or unenforceable, but there should not be a dispute whether it means one thing, which is legal, or another, which isn't.

rmc 10y ago

> What I meant was that, if the license's meaning was disputed in court, the court should agree that it meant what the company intended for it to mean. And my point is that sometimes what the company intends/wants is illegal. And the courts should For example, a company might want employees to sign away rights to minimum wage. We can clearly see what the company intends in that contract, but the courts will not agree with it. "Contracts are sacred and unbreakable" is an ethical/legal stance associated with libertarianism, and it is not what many countries follow.

danarmak 10y ago
Yes, of course, some things are illegal and cannot be agreed to in contracts. I'm not saying contracts should be sacred. I'm saying the contract's meaning should be as clear as possible so courts will agree the license meant what the company intended it to mean. The court can still say the license is illegal or unenforceable, but there should not be a dispute whether it means one thing, which is legal, or another, which isn't.