Decision
The crux of the issue is whether or not the plaintiff's agreed to be bound by the defendant's licensing terms when they downloaded the free plug-in, even though the plaintiffs could not have learned of the existence of the terms before downloading. The court found that "a reasonably prudent Internet user in circumstances such as these would not have known or learned of the existence of the license terms before responding to defendants’ invitation to download the free software, and that defendants therefore did not provide reasonable notice of the license terms."
Claims related to SmartDownload are not covered by the license agreement for Netscape Communicator, despite the fact that SmartDownload is meant to enhance the functioning of Communicator. This means that when the plaintiffs clicked through Communicator's license agreement, they were not agreeing to the SmartDownload agreement.
Specht was not bound by the SmartDownload agreement as a non-contracting beneficiary because he had no preexisting relationship with the parties, was not an agent of any party, and received no direct benefit from users downloading files from his website.
Read more about this topic: Specht V. Netscape Communications Corp.
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