What license agreements really mean

Computerworld -

Read carefully: By coming within proximity of this license agreement, you or anyone who looks like you agrees to be bound, gagged and held accountable to the terms of this End-User License Agreement, while Megaloshaft Corp. will be held harmless under any and all circumstances. In addition, you agree to be bound by additional license terms that accompany any updates we apply to this software without your knowledge.
1. Registration: Megaloshaft products won't function until the software is properly registered.
2. Statement of Privacy: Any personal information we require is used strictly for statistical purposes. Megaloshaft will under no circumstances show, sell, rent or otherwise make available to others any of the personal information we collect, such as your name, address, phone number, credit card numbers, e-mail address, tax returns or the VHS tapes we have of you cheating on your spouse with the neighbor down the street. In order to allay any fears about the amount and type of data we require during registration, Megaloshaft provides additional privacy insurance. Registered users can obtain our privacy insurance policy free of charge with every paid copy of our customer database.
3. Redefinition of Terms: Megaloshaft reserves the right to redefine the terms of this agreement and will do so at the first opportunity. In fact, by the time you find out where we hid this document on our Web site, our per-CPU license policy will be in effect. By the time you get your first bill, our per-million-transistor license policy will be in effect. See Provision 4 for details.
4. Repay Audit Provision: All users who are carbon-based - and that means all of you - automatically and unconditionally qualify for our per-million-transistor license plan. Under this plan, you pay only $10 for every million transistors used by your company employees, their Aunt Tilly (see Provision 9) and any of their relatives, up to third cousins twice removed. You are required to audit your computing resources each year to calculate the average number of transistors in use per day. To give you an idea of how this is calculated, the AMD Athlon CPU contains about 37 million transistors. A digital watch contains a couple thousand transistors, depending on the brand.
5. Audit Waiver Options: You may waive our right to obligate you to perform an audit by purchasing a 50-year subscription fee for all the software you use, including Megaloshaft products. Upgrade options are available at extra cost. If you decline the waiver, you can ease the audit process by purchasing our specially designed transistor counting system, which scans everyone who enters or exits the building for transistor-containing devices such as cellular phones, digital cameras or those greeting cards that play tunes when you open them. This system comes with a free, handy 12-gallon sealed trash compartment, which we prepack with our excess defective integrated circuits, and it even counts its own transistors, the number of which varies depending on our available stock of defective parts.
6. Trustworthy Crackproof Initiative: When it comes to a commitment to security, Megaloshaft is second to NONE. (NONE is a registered trademark of No Obvious Network Experience Inc.) We assure you that Megaloshaft has taken every possible precaution to . . . DiS LiCeNZ BiN CRaCk3D BiE dA kInDyG4T3N bRiG4dE!! wE 0wN y00 d00dZ!
7. Kava: This product may support Kava. Kava is not ground, blended, percolated or otherwise processed for use in air traffic control systems, hospital devices, biological warfare weaponry, doomsday machines or answering machines. We will not be held responsible if your use of Kava fails to prevent a plane crash, an X-ray machine boiling your brain, a global epidemic of jock itch, a black hole that destroys the solar system or your mother-in-law visiting unannounced. Why Spin Macrosystems has contractually obligated us to make this frightening disclaimer is beyond our lawyers' imaginations, but we're tickled pink.
8. Penalty: You will be liable for 100 times the price of this product if you violate this contract or any undocumented or future provisions in any way.
9. Relative Terms: Not having an Aunt Tilly constitutes breach of contract.
10. There is no Provision 10, subject to change.
Nicholas Petreley is a computer consultant and author in Hayward,Calif. He can be reached at nicholas@petreley.com.