A serious threat to our national security

You failed to specify that the product did or did not produce the expected result. It may make a difference.

Sorry for being unclear. I am now specifying that the product never existed. The buyer bought it and paid for it, then the seller, rather than delivering it, appeared to disapear off the face of the earth.

And yes, buyers often do have to pay before recieving the product. That's how mail order catalog, Amazon.com and eBay work.

So, let me ask those who believe that you cannot cheat an honest man once again:

If an honest man buys a product from what he believes to be an honest seller, then that seller skips town with the money instead of delivering the product, which conclusion is correct:

[1] Nobody got cheated [2] The honest man was really dishonest. [3] You *can* cheat an honest man. [4] Other (specify) ___________________

--
Guy Macon

I remember them being in the news when the ruling of not enforceable came out. It was a long time ago. If you are that interested try a law library.

I will take 2 in this case. If any deal looks too good to be true, it usually is. Occasionally, 3 occurs, but it is very rare.

It seems to me that the burden of proof should be on the one who claims something exists. I have made what I think is a reasonable effort to find such a ruling. If there had been a court decision in the US concerning shrink-wrap EULA enforceability other than the somewhat-related EULA screen during install case I already mentioned, there would no doubt be many references to it.

If you can remember any details about what you remember being in the news it would be a big help searching for it.

--
Guy Macon

Where did I say that the deal was too good to be true? I described what appears to be a perfectly ordinary offer by an apparantly legitimate seller, completely undistinguishable from dozens of other items for sale be honest sellers.

Are there statistics available, or is the above an educated guess? I have no idea how to estimate how common it would be.

--
Guy Macon

Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8Bit

Richard Henry wrote:

I can find no ruling on shrink-wrap licences mentioned in the Wikipedia article referenced above. The cases the Wikipedia article does reference are all click-wrap EULAs, not shrink-wrap EULAs. Thus the statement "In general, a user is not legally obligated to read, let alone consent to any literature or envelope packaging that may be contained inside a product..." The software vendor has a much stronger case if the user clicks on a big "I AGREE" button.

Everything I have seen so far indicates that nobody has ever tried to enforce a shrinkwrap EULA in a US court.  If they never sue anyone for violating a shrinkwrap EULA, no court ever gets a chance to rule that a shrinkwrap EULA is not a binding contract.

By reading this Usenet post, the reader agrees to the following:

This post is licenced for dissemination to other news servers by means of the NNTP protocol as defined in RFCs 977 and 2980 provided it is quoted in whole or with minimal modifications as required by the specifications above, the content of this post may - in whole or in part - be reproduced under "fair use" for replys to this article, appling recursivly to enable this article to be quoted in future articles in this thread including, but not limited to, quotations used in the future refering to this topic and the thoughts expressed within it. Permission is also granted to store this article for public retrieval on the condition it remains attributed and unmodifed except as explained above, unless this post contains the header "X-NO-Archive" (case insensitive). The copyright of all original portions of this document remains with the poster as identified above, portions of the entire article may be copyrighted to another party, all trademarks that may be referenced are also acknowleged. Furthermore, all contact data contained in this post (including email addresses) is licenced for use only for correspondance, the 'harvesting' of this address for marketing purposes is strictly prohibbited. Each indervidual charector as an ascii stored bit may be reside in memory belonging to the owner of hardware, in which case the legal responsibility of this article, including deletion if found inflamitory can I stop doing this now or is anyone still reading this far, I mean it started off well, but I can't really go on typing this stuff, can I? eventually it turns into something like the default text for MS Publisher files, lorum ipso decoum est ipso lurmo groucho foo bar baz and indeed frek blah blah every alternate tuesday blur, blah blah blair blair thatcher gosh politics in a thread that could spell danger, it would probably be best if I stopped doing this now before I spend the next several lines going zootle wordle, so I conclude with the facts that portions of this document are invalid where void, and most of it should not be taken as legal in any way unless you really really want to get into all sorts of trouble, but the important thing is that the end of this must have LOTS AND LOTS OF CAPITAL LETTERS ABOUT THE "CONSUMER" HAVING ACCEPTED THIS LICENCE THE MOMENT THEY KNEW THAT USENET EXISTED AND NOBODY HAVING ANY RIGHTS TO EVEN READ THIS LICENCE, CONTENTS VOID WHERE PROHIBITED, MAY CONTAIN TRACES OF NUTS.

--
Guy Macon

...

OK, I guess I have to admit - I keep forgetting that not everyone's an empath. ;-)

Cheers! Rich

Well, I didn't say you couldn't _steal_ from one. ;-P

Cheers! Rich

Did you check if anyone else has bought anything from this guy, and received product?

Thanks, Rich

Microsoft's, of course. ;-P

Cheers! Rich

Got a mirror? ;-P

Cheers! Rich

ut

non sequitur

One particular eBay seller I bought from had a reputation of 100% satisfied customers with 300 transactions over a two-year period. then suddenly he skipped town leaving a bunch of people hanging. (I got my $20 item. but many other folks didn't.) Every month the consumer watchdog collum in Maxinum PC magazine has tales of formerly reliable hardware vendors going belly up and yet still accepting payments right to the last. Airlines and cruise ships do the same thing -- selling tickets while planning a shutdown and bankruptcy. years ago the owners of the JC Whitney auto parts catalog went bankrupt, kept all the money that had been paid, and didn't ship any parts or give any refunds. The bankruptcy judge allowed them to stay in business, and everyone was able to get the parts they ordered -- by paying twice.

Many scam artists can be identified beforehand.

Some are betterat it and cannot be identified beforehand.

And when the real experts scam you you never realize that you were scammed.

--
Guy Macon

On Tue, 26 Aug 2008 07:37:27 +0000, Guy Macon wrote: ...

But if the vendor was desperately trying to keep his head above water, and flopped when he owed you, no doubt incurring much wors consequences than you have, is that really fraud, or a "scam"?

It sounds like two guys that were essentially victims of circumstances beyond their control.

OK, if the guy intentionally went through all of that rigamarole just to scam a few hundred bucks, well, then, prosecute him.

But still, the honest man didn't get _cheated_, he got _robbed_, so I get to take the semantics loophole escape route here. ;-)

Cheers! Rich

IIRC it was between the PC-AT being well established and the introduction of the '486. Not exactly recent. Also ISTM about 3 to

5 years after shrink-wrap licences first became popular with software merchants.

I still look just fine, how do you look? BTW do you like my beard?

Along the same lines: