192 EULAs I have agreed upon during a year and a half adds up a quarter of the words of Encyclopædia Britannica
If we must read all the EULAs we agree upon we would not have time for work. Nor free time.
TL;DR
The computer I am writing on right now has been in my custody for about a year and a half. During this time I have collected every EULA I needed to agree upon. It adds up to 192 EULAs. Many are most certainly similar, like GPL, and others are probably variants of themselves.
I stored the agreements in RTF format except for Flash that is in PDF and a IE9 update that it seems I had to track down on the web and download the HTML page with PNGs and all. It all ends up at slightly more than 62 megs.
Now these 62 megs of data stored mostly in RTF aren’t 62 millions of readable characters so I took a 72k rtf document and saved as text. 66k. That is roughly 10% overhead. So I guess out of 62 megs I have about 57 megs of characters.
192 files. 57 million characters. With about 5 letters in an english word this would be slightly more than 11 million words. If a page has 250 words this would be 45500 pages. By comparision the whole Harry Potters series is about 3400 pages. Encyclopædia Britannica is 40 million words.
To be honest: one can’t compare word count between a book and an EULA since the former is written in English while the latter in Legalece.
Tags: eula, license, not-fully-invented, words