That’s not how contract interpretation works. The vast majority of things are clearly datacenters or clearly not datacenters. Assuming the contract is enforceable for other reasons, if you use it in something that is clearly understood to be a datacenter, you would be in breach.
Do you really think a judge would be swayed by your little word game?
In the US? Depending on the district sued: absolutely. That shouldn't be the case, but it 100% is.
Unless there is a rigid legal definition for "datacenter", lawyers are allowed to argue that because the EULA specifically used the phrasing it does, that means nVidia has a definition that they have not made plain in the same document, which is grounds to void the clause. They are also allowed to argue that nVidia must produce a definition of "datacenter" which thanks to case law means that then becomes the official definition used in future court cases, something that nVidia would really not want to be responsible for.
It's an amazing bit of "did you actually think this through?" when you actually look at the ramification of an EULA clause like this.
My point is that you’re mistaken in saying above that something is a datacenter only if you call it such. Words must have meanings if we are to have agreements.
Whether this particularly contract will result in a court case is beside the point. And I wouldn’t be so sure it wouldn’t. Nvidia’s lawyers might have something to say if you start a business reselling GPU time for ML tasks and run it off thousands of GeForce cards with these drivers. And if they don’t get what they want, they would have good reason to go to court to defend their market segmentation strategy.
Because that is how such things work. People and companies trying to find loopholes. And renaming your stuff is exactly that. On a side note you can just go to countries where you are not at mercy of corporations.
There are other examples too: Software that is not allowed for more then 1 CPU socket; just create a VM with as much cores as you like. Loss in performance is often not an issue, problem solved. Standard practice.
For that interpretation of a contract to fly, you would have to argue that a reasonable person would believe that the meaning of datacenter is nothing more than “a thing that is called a datacenter”.
I should make a contract to sell you gold, take your money, then give you a pile of rotting wood and argue that I call it “gold”, so you have no remedy.
Well yes. The definition of data center (which is laking from Nvidia) is very wide. My room in the house could be a data center. Besides that, since the contract wasn't made at the point of purchase (datacenter clause) I can ignore it anyway.
Why should I give you money for rotting wood in the first place?
Have you never paid for something before receiving it? The whole point of the example is that you pay for a contract for gold, then I deliver rotting wood.
Playing dumb about a definition doesn’t do much for you. Barring the other party having good reason to expect you to be confused, you are held to the objective meaning of a contract. And for all of the situations Nvidia cares about, it is obviously a datacenter.
