Anonymous writes "New York state Supreme Court Justice Marilyn Shafer issued a ruling prohibiting Network Associates from using its end-user license agreements to ban product reviews or benchmark tests. The end-user agreement stated that "The customer will not publish reviews of this product without prior consent from Network Associates Inc." The judge called the company's attempted ban "deceptive" because the licensing agreement's language may cause people to believe that they're breaking the law by reviewing the product without consent. The New York attorney general's office (press release) began investigating the case after Network Associates demanded a retraction and accused a magazine of violating its licensing agreement after the magazine published an unfavorable review of NA's "Gauntlet" firewall software. At the time, the company's agreement stated that people could not review or test Network Associates products without prior approval from the company. The company's control-freakiness may end up costing it a few million dollars as the state of NY is asking the court to impose a $.50 fine for every product sold with this end-user agreement.
Is this the beginning of a shrinkwrap rollback or can we expect to see even more shrinkwrap licenses in our future. How long before our Audio CDs come with a shrinkwrap license?
Editor's note: This blurb was contributed by the great Henry Oh from Stanford Law. -- PJSUPDATE 2130ET 22 Jan 2003
Lisa Bowman of C|Net News has a more indepth version of this story (Court: Network Associates can't gag users). - EDM"