across the universe, or eula à gogo

In the Holiday Inn Express in St Louis again. Their clickwrap EULA for wireless access from Zerowire Networks is hilarious. The whole text is quoted after the cut, but the highlights include:

  • anything you transmit over the network (like your credit card details, your login for legopr0n.com, or this blog posting) belongs to the hotel, and “may be processed, used, reproduced, modified, adapted, translated, used to create derivative works, shared, published and distributed by HOTEL in its sole and absolute discretion in any media and manner irrevocably in perpetuity in any location throughout the universe”. So I’m sure the murals at the first Holiday Inn Express on Mars will be decorated with credit card info.
  • Riddled with typos and random copy-and-pasted sections, you nonetheless “waive any right to claim ambiguity or error in this Agreement!” [yep, the exclamation mark’s part of it too]
  • About half way into it, it starts representing Hilton Hotels, rather than Holiday Inn. I suspect Ctrl-C, Ctrl-V here.
  • Gives up-to-the-minute advice for setting cookie preferences for IE4, a browser that became obsolete in 1998.

As it’s such a mishmash, I think I’m pretty much exempted, ‘cos I crossed my fingers behind my back before clicking “Accept” …