Lawyers say never to sign (or click on) anything without reading it first, but that rule typically goes out the window when it comes to complex-yet-boring end user licensing agreements (EULAs) and other software licenses.
As John Oliver said in his epic net neutrality screed: “If you want to do something evil, put it inside something boring. Apple could put the entire text of Mein Kampf inside the iTunes user agreement and you’d just go: Agree. Agree. Agree.”
That read-before-clicking mantra holds true for license agreements from cloud providers as well. For example, I would bet that when many startups — which often don’t have legal departments — sign on for Amazon Web Services, they don’t check out all the verbiage fully. And they should.
In particular, there is a provision in the AWS customer agreement that they really should scrutinize. The contract’s Section 8.5 on license restrictions includes the usual restrictions…
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