What good are rights when corporations can just have users sign them away by agreeing with some policy? They already make users waive a lot of rights, including the right to pursue legal action, the right to reverse engineer...
These shrink wrap licences can be legislated away. Lots of EU countries have consumer protection legislation that explicitly forbids/invalidates such imbalanced or unexpected terms in the fine print for consumer-facing contracts -- or indeed invalidates shrink-wrap licence terms outright.
Plus a lot of people simply assume there's no recourse even when there in fact is ("the US is an anarchist wonderland where consumers have no protections at all" is a harmful and false meme, what we have is the widespread assumption that consumers have no protections), and of those who don't, who really wants to spend a ton of time in any sort of legal or arbitration resolution over 40 books, which almost certainly total far less than any possible legal or arbitration battle will cost?
The legal system, US, EU, or otherwise, doesn't have a good answer to when a company bones .01% of several million people to the tune of several hundred dollars, or bones its entire customer base for $1 or something. By the time you bust through their contract clauses against class action and even find everyone affected you've long since eaten up any value you're going to get from the lawsuit even if you win big and win punitive damages. Computers make it so much easier to do this kind of thing on the company's side, but they don't help anyone trying to fight it anywhere near as much. Very asymmetrical advantage for the companies to hit people like this at some scale.
The biggest problem is that the US legal system is incredibly expensive. You can have justice, but only if you tens or hundreds of thousands of $$ to spend and prevail. In theory, everyone can get their day in court and (likely) enjoy reasonable protection. In practice, that's not happening.
Instead, what's happening is that such things wait for class action lawyers to take the case - which I would guess happens to less than one in a hundred cases in which a company utilizes this asymmetry.
Yes, the lawyers rake in the money and the victims get virtually nothing but it created a market-driven method of enforcing rules; a immune to political whims.
Sadly arbitration clauses have become the norm, but I don’t know if they have merit with EULAs.
But I would like to see class action suits make a come-back.
I believe the EU has different cost/benefit tradeoffs, but they're still not something to be done casually or easily by a consumer at this scale of damage. For instance, "loser pays" sounds great until you lose. Even if your obligations are statutorily limited it's still not something to take on over, let's say, Amazon restricting access to the 40 books you purchased, to pull an example from nowhere.
The damages in such a case are so low that it's difficult for any legal system to provide a reasonable mechanism for redress. Even if you valuate your time at the local minimum wage, even a small claims court is going to take more time than is worth it for one person. You'll probably be waiting in the courtroom for longer than the value of the books in question.
The real problem here isn't that the US is a consumer rights wasteland when it isn't; the real problem is the huge asymmetrical advantages companies have, in any jurisdiction, in screwing significant numbers of people just a little bit.
Small claims court awarded "lost time" (in the loser pays) in the few cases I'm aware of. I know of several people who've taken a local retailer to court (Not quite Amazon, but think of e.g. New York's PC Richards and Sons size), and were made truly whole for a $200 case (that is, got their $200 back, and a few $100 more for effort). If these things happen in the US, I haven't heard of them.
> The real problem is the huge asymmetrical advantages companies have, in any jurisdiction, in screwing significant numbers of people just a little bit.
Yes, but situation in Europe is IMHO a bit better, both from the small-courts, binding-arbitration-instead-of-courts looked down upon, and much stronger regulation on rights, like fit-for-purpose, lemon laws, and even things like GDPR.
The bottom line is, regardless what the rules say, a person in Europe suffers, on average, much less than the power asymmetry - although they do pay for that upfront with higher prices (which also pay for other stuff like education and universal medical care - it's hard to untangle, but it's protection that likely isn't free).
USA also has mandated rights notifications.
There are specific absences of laws in certain particular cases.