The original Minecraft EULA did not have any of the usual boilerplate language to support unilaterally modifying the terms. I had a Minecraft account purchased under this original EULA which was modified a year or two after I bought the game. Around 5 or 6 years ago, Mojang emailed me about changes to their login system that would require me to migrate my account to Microsoft’s system (no doubt under new T+C), but the migration process never worked and they never responded to my support requests.

When I tried to resolve it a couple of years ago I received boilerplate emails informing me that the migration period had ended.

So if you deal with companies that simply don’t honor their contracts—companies like Microsoft and Mojang—you don’t even need use to imply consent, because they can just lock you out of your purchases and tell you to pound sand.

I remember various judges writing ope-eds about being presented a 40 page TOS for updates. Southpark also did an episode.

TOS simultaneously became extremly important, commanding CEO attention and became completely ritulized.

I'm surprised that the legal profession has tolerated this is escalation of dysfunction.

Is it just me or is the US unraveling?

Even if it makes things overly complicated sometimes, I like the EU style that forces companies to make people actively confirm their consent, and puts the 'inform' part of 'informed consent' into the company's responsibility.

the key issue is the interpretation of "consent" when continued use is the only option. aree users truly consenting, or are they simply left with no alternative?

And courts keep wondering why commoners lose respect for the law. I know a judge and had a couple of really interesting conversations with him. We agreed on lots of things but there was one item that stood out for me that made a massive difference in interpretation: to him the map was the territory, he saw the law as the thing that made the world, not the other way around. I always found that to be extremely interesting in that it explains why some of those decisions come across so completely tone deaf. On paper it may all look like it makes sense but in the real world it leads to bonkers effects.

I had the somehow the same problem with a mobile operator here in EU. They said just by sending an email I agree with their new terms and subscriptions. It's a gray area, IMO. They could simply terminate the service but who wants that?

Might be fun to take some BSD or MIT licenses and send out e-mails updating them to GPLv3...

"and we do not hold that notice by mass email establishes inquiry notice in every case."

Basically the case met two of three factors and so they said yeah probably but its not establishing precedent because each case is special.