Enable Term and Condition after reading

Question

I'm installing CorelDraw a program and, like in any installation, there is this part where the installation wizard asks you if you are agreeing to the End-user Licensing Agreement (EULA). Now, like everybody usually does (come on, lets not lie to ourselves, you know who you are), I immediately checked the I have read and agree... checkbox, but it is disabled. And a tiny prompt message (more like a tooltip to me) appeared, indicating that:

Please scroll and read first the agreement before checking.

Now being a little irritated, I immediately scroll it downwards (for 8 seconds, I think?) down to the end but it still not being enabled. After another couple of seconds (like 4 seconds), it became enabled and I continued with the installation.

Now, is this approach really effective? Because, even this approach is used, as the reader, I personally didn't even finished reading the whole agreement. Considering that computers cannot (as of the time of this writing) accurately determine 100% if you read and understand everything all the content of it.

Home computers, laptops, etc... don't have that complex visual detection hardware that can detect the movement of your eyes if it actually read and move from left to right, nor x-ray or aero-chemical scanners to determine if some parts of your brain is "actually" processing the context of the agreement, nor lie-detectors if your really telling the truth about agreeing to the EULA.

I'm just wondering.

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P.S. Of course, telling that you agreed to an agreement even if without reading the whole EULA is your own fault.

Answer 1

I am just going to throw that in there, as I cannot actually say any of this with confidence or base this on any factual knowledge. My guess is that they want to circumvent liability, that is, nowadays it is so common to skip these agreements that chances are (again I am not a lawyer, I am completely out of my depth here) somebody is actually going to be able to prove or claim that this method of agreeing to terms between two parties is actually so inefficient and generally seen by us "laymen" as "standard procedure" and going to win a case. That may especially be true in cases where such EULAs contain agreements that are obviously trying to act "shady" (I once had a discussion with a lawyer friend of mine, he said something along the lines of "companies cannot actually put anything >surprising< in there").

So in a way, this delay will enforce you to at least consider reading the agreement, as opposed to just blindly clicking it away. Heck, less technically inclined people will probably just end up reading the whole thing if there really is a "scrolled-to-end" check.

So, this is just a very subjective opinion that is absolutely not based on any evidence. Please take it with a grain of salt.