Le lun. 01/04/13, 16:30, xdrudis xdrudis@tinet.cat:
I heard somewhere that one study set up to measure how much contract legalese internet users did not read when using online services, and reached the conclusion that an average internet user should dedicate some 70 days a year in reading the terms of use and similar clauses of all the web services they use. They apparently don't care to read them, even less to negotiate them, or even to reject the services because of their terms. So they may be similarly inclined about software licences. Sorry I don't have the quote handy.
The average found by the study was 76 days. But what you can conclude from this is that it is completely impractical to read (not even understand) the terms of service you subscribe to online. To make the conclusion that people don't care about what's in them is completely out of proportion. We have no research that I'm aware of that can measure how much people care about their rights online. But the fact that FSFE, EFF or projects like tosdr.org get funded by individuals and sustain is one sign that actually enough people *do* care.
Much like with software freedom. Do most people care about it? Until they are aware of the concept and of the dangers of non-free software, it is indeed very unlikely. But people can become aware of it quite easily.
In the end, I think it is useless to ascertain whether people care or not about the law. This is too broad and difficult to measure for us anyway.
What we do konw is that *we* care about our rights and freedoms and there's definitely enough legal ground to make a meaningful proposal that people should have the right to be in control of hardware they buy. So let's focus on that.
There have been some proposals here, and I'd like to see more ideas coming :-)