White94 said:
Legal and moral are 2 totally seperate ideas.
Sometimes true, maybe even true in this case.
My morals as a long-time programmer say that the creator of valuable electronic content should have a say in how and when that content is distributed and that their wishes should be spelled out in an agreement available to the end-user prior to purchase.
Before I bought my NSX last year I paid for a month of Carfax and wound up running a bunch of reports for people here on prime. I did it because I felt like Carfax's terms of service were ambiguous and could reasonably be interpreted to allow me to do this.
After about 40 reports, I got an email from Carfax questioning my motives for running so many. At that point, I chilled my heals and before long my month was up and that was that.
So, the question is, has Carfax changed their TOS to be less ambiguous. I don't know, haven't looked, don't really care.
My take at the time was that Carfax was letting people do this in order to spread their brand awareness and their motive for cracking down now is to cash in, to reap the benefits of ubiquity. It's the Microsoft model to a "T".
I've heard of several people being threatened and of no one actually being charged big bucks. The cancellation of accounts seems to be fairly recent.
In the end, it's their product and they're entitled to set the terms. I hope their TOS is not as gray and fuzzy as it used to be. If they're going to hammer people, they should be clear from the start.
