MPW Blog: Mr. EULA and The Cloud – by Karl Huddleston

The Cloud

You may remember a few years ago when Walmart announced its big “Cloud” initiative in relation to DVDs and Blu-ray movies. Basically, you could bring in all your discs that you had purchased in the past from anywhere, and they would take them and “give” you a copy of that movie “in The Cloud” that you would own “forever” and stream whenever you like.

Yeah, right.

This is the part where I love to introduce our good friend, “Mr. EULA” (pronounced “yoo-la”). I became good friends with Mr. EULA when I worked for seven years at a large software company doing compliance work. Essentially, my job was to make sure that all our customers had paid for all the software they were using, because they could install as many instances of the software as they wanted — at will. Continue reading