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Sound familiar? It’s only a slight exaggeration of the typical EULA. That stands for End User License Agreement. At best you can find yourself required to accept its terms to proceed. At worst you may deemed to have accepted its terms by the mere act of visiting a particular website or opening a package of software.

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Many of EULAs are very long and require a college education at least to decipher. I am not aware of any cases in which a EULA was enforced against a Web surfer. But it could happen. Chances are you would not agree to the terms and conditions if you read and understood them.

Most of the time people just agree without reading the EULA. Would they ever be surprised if that indemnity agreement were to bite them in the hindquarters. There is a strong possibility that courts might refuse to enforce such overreaching contracts ruling that there was never meeting of the minds.

I am one of that rare breed who actually reads most EULAs before agreeing to them. About half the time I find them so oppressive that I decline to agree and forfeit whatever benefit I was hoping for. It’s one of the curses that comes with being a lawyer.

You might be able to get away with telling a judge, “Duh, I didn’t really understand what it meant.”

I can’t.

Recently, Facebook asserted in its newly revised EULA that any material posted on the public portion of its site could be used for any purpose by Facebook for all eternity. Somebody must have read it because word got around and Facebook revised its EULA to eliminate the offending provisions.

This is the place for someone, hopefully not the government, to create a standard EULA most companies could use, either in whole or in part. In the latter case, a EULA might say it was the standard EULA plus the following few paragraphs. Then you would need to read only the parts that varied from the standard and we could stop agreeing to unknown provisions.

Contact Lionel Waxman at territorial@waxmanmedia.com or visit his website: www.waxmanmedia.com. Lionel Waxman’s Flashpoint commentaries are published in The Daily Territorial.