Ask HN: Is the EULA on my new $30k RED cinema camera legal?

Contract law requires payment. What's the payment for acceptance of this eula?

"Works as you expect it to" is not the same thing as "fit for purpose". The purpose of a hammer is (mostly) an objective fact. Your expectations of what the hammer can do, on the other hand, may or may not be reasonable.

(Though in this case I think it's perfectly reasonable to claim that the camera is not fit for purpose if the EULA terms were not clearly disclosed before the purchase was made.)

> They don't need the whole clip. They can easily grab a single frame, encoded and compressed to minimize the filesize.

Yeah, that would be valid telemetry, though telemetry should be opt-out, it's fairly innocuous.

> It could be constantly trying to phone home over open wireless networks (or partner hotspots). Hell for all I know the thing could have a 3g radio in it, constantly talking to home.

It's pretty silly to imagine a product that is primarily used by hollywood studios doing this. I have interfaced directly with folks working on-set for major productions supporting the systems that actually capture and share the content for collaboration purposes.

Let me tell you, even for a company whose ENTIRE business is doing this, it's fucking HARD. It still involves producers taking bags of memory cards into their hotel room at the end of the day and uploading them on a laptop, in almost all cases.

The only connected set I'm aware of ever existing is Mindhunter[0], and it involved our engineers being on set and operating our entire cloud stack within roadie cases.

Simply put, the things that people are afraid RED would do are so complicated as to be nearly technically infeasible when major studios are willing to pay for them.

[0] https://thefincheranalyst.com/2019/07/10/pix-onset-makes-con...

That's not a claim I made in my comment.

OP said "you're not entitled by law to take a hammer back if it doesn't work as you expect it to" and that's false, if it's sold as a hammer it needs to serve the ordinary purpose of a hammer, and that is covered by law in most jurisdictions (US/EU at the minimum).

Whether you could argue that a post-sale EULA (or EULA change) that renders the device inoperable for its ordinary purpose invokes merchantability is an interesting argument though, and that really gets back to "how much money do you have for lawyers", "how much are they willing to try and test their EULA's validity", etc. Tractors are probably an interesting example there (don't remember if it's been brought up here or not).

I think the big problem there is that merchantability is a claim against the merchant, and while you'd probably get your money back if you disagreed with the EULA a week after the sale, what happens if John Deere pushes an update a year after you buy the tractor and it's de-facto bricked at that point if you don't agree? The situation with software makes the whole thing so much more complicated, and the law is different there around ownership in general (you don't own the software, you have a license to use the software, but the tractor doesn't work without the software either).

It's shitty and the "ownership" situation with software really needs significant reform (that will never happen in the US). Ownership of a software license needs to be brought closer to ownership of a physical good, but that will break the business models of a lot of companies who will lobby to make sure that never happens.

I've followed this project from the start (10 years ago or so) and they haven't really made a viable product. It's a cool idea but actually implementing this stuff is harder than it looks.