alt Hacker NewsIs this actually true? Doesn't the action of directing someone to compile this code, mean they are allowed to compile this code? Of course they are not allowed to do anything else, but this is what I want as a user. I think it is more, that the vendors want to push the user to grant them more rights than what would be strictly necessary for them to do they job they "sell".
This is what's been explained to me before. The problem is that lawyers don't necessarily work on the basis of "if it seems reasonable that the user allowed this, then this is allowed". Their goal is to make a contract that, if they need to go to court, will make their job as easy as possible. So it's not enough to say "obviously the user pressed the 'compile' button and we needed to do all this stuff to make that happen, here's all my technical experts who agree", instead they would rather say "paragraph 3 subsection 12 clearly allows this behaviour and the user has agreed to it".
It's also, as I understand it, the reason why law has so much of an emphasis on seemingly magic phrases that you copy and repeat in all sorts of different places. These are phrases that have already been tested and have a meaning that has been made clear in a court of law, so if you need to go to court to defend them, you can pull up the existing case law on the subject and rely on that, rather than having to analyse exactly what the new wording means. Hence why these T&C documents tend to have a lot of fairly standard phrases that don't obviously mean what you expect them to mean.