Wendy Seltzer of the Chilling Effects project has done a comprehensive roundup of the unfair and undesirable language in the new Windows Vista license — all the abusive crap you “agree” to when you give Microsoft your money. Upgrading to Vista is the start of an abusive relationship that could last for years.
4. Problem-solving prohibited. “You may not work around any technical limitations in the software.” Microsoft might be referring to anticircumvention of technical protection measures here, but since it’s often hard to tell the difference, from the user’s perspective, between a TPM and a bug, this reads as a prohibition on user debugging and problem-solving. After all, down-rezzing, HD content or refusing to allow users to copy quotes from an e-book don’t strike most people as wanted features. Can you work around a document’s failure to save properly?