Free Confidentiality Agreements

It’s not too often that lawyers give away their work, but Gene Quinn of IPWatchdog.com is doing just that by providing some free sample confidentiality agreements. If you can afford to pay an attorney for simple agreements like this, more power to you; otherwise you may want to grab these free agreements while you can. There …

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AutoCAD 2011 EULA Changes

For AutoCAD 2011, Autodesk made relatively few changes in the EULA. They fixed the grammar error that was introduced in AutoCAD 2010, but they didn’t make any changes to the convoluted “License Grant” wording that was also added in AutoCAD 2010. There are a handful of minor tweaks here and there, but the only substantial …

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A brief history of copyright

Tyler Ochoa (law professor and two time “Jeopardy!” champion) writes an interesting post about the 300th anniversary of the first copyright law, called the Statute of Anne. Referring to the motivation behind the original law, Ochoa says “Although the Stationers were chiefly concerned with restoring and perpetuating their monopoly, they framed their petition to Parliament …

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What’s New in the AutoCAD 2010 EULA

Everyone else is discussing all the cool new features in AutoCAD 2010, so I decided to have a look at what’s new in the EULA (End User License Agreement). I compared the AutoCAD 2010 EULA for US/Canada to the AutoCAD 2009 EULA. I won’t divulge the process I used to automate the comparison, because the …

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Software Licensing: A Case For Reform

I want to consider software licensing practices in general, but with the specific facts and history in the Vernor vs. Autodesk lawsuit as a backdrop. In the Vernor case, Tim Vernor purchased several boxes of AutoCAD software, and never even read, let alone agreed to, the terms of the license agreement inside the box. When …

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