121–130 of 191 posts
I tried to read some of them to see what has changed. I really tried... If any lawyers from the future are reading this: It was impossible for me to see what I was agreeing to. Furthermore, I was not given a chance to not agree with these (unknown) changes.
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I thought contracts can’t be copyrighted? There is too much similarity between them for it to make any sense.
No, that's nonsense. I don't know if there's a special exemption in the US but contracts and policies can be and absolutely are under copyright. Individual clauses might not be but the contract in its entirety likely meets the threshold of originality required for it to not simply be considered a plain collection of facts. The similarity between standard contracts does make it harder to demonstrate a copyright violat…
That sounds absurd. What country is this?
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Good idea. I might start doing this
Sounds like building something simple that aids in tracking “coverage” of reviewing ToSs could be useful to increase that the odds of spotting something untoward? Iirc there was (is?) a site which gives a rating to the various license agreements of popular services and the like, so maybe it’s a solved problem?
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These are most likely not legally binding in the UK as consumer contracts and notices as a whole have to be fair (transparent, in good faith and intelligible) to consumers under the Consumer Rights Act 2015.
Same in Germany. There was an interesting case against WhatsApp banning a user for using a third-party app, which WhatsApp argued was against the ToS but the court ruled that the user could not have expected this to result in account termination as using third-party clients was perfectly acceptable practice for similar apps and the user was not explicitly warned this would happen. Basically you can't sneak gotchas in…
There is a lot to be learned in this regard from financial products online. Most of them have built in functionality to let users know what they are doing and the associated risk.
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Part of me wishes there was a law that companies had to implement checks that their customers read and understood the agreement. Timers, making sure people had each line of text on the screen for a sufficient amount of time, and line by line video explainers. Just to expose the ridiculousness of it all.
In one "inside a video game" LitRPG the main character gains an achievement for being the first person to read the ToS to the end before clicking "accept".
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Same in Germany. There was an interesting case against WhatsApp banning a user for using a third-party app, which WhatsApp argued was against the ToS but the court ruled that the user could not have expected this to result in account termination as using third-party clients was perfectly acceptable practice for similar apps and the user was not explicitly warned this would happen. Basically you can't sneak gotchas in…
Interesting case, I didn't know of that one. Thanks for posting! > Ironically this is unlike actual laws where ignorance is not an excuse I think it's similar to real laws. Unacceptable rules: sneaking in terms such as that your firstborn child will belong to me is not enforceable: nobody could expect or would agree to that. In law, similarly, you can't just upend someone's life for a minor infraction, or indeed take…
Yeah, that's the theory. But what a judge will decide qualifies for "minor" may or may not align with what is sane or what most people believe, and this gets worse and worse if you go into higher courts with politically appointed judges.
On practice governments upend people lives all the time, even for presumed infractions that may not be there at all.
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It is crazy how unreasonable the world of law is. Just some days ago, I installed some game (Assassins Creed I think?) and it had 3 agreements to read, each one a kilometer long (just a figure of speech). Really? To play a game? Of course nobody reads them and just press Accept.
Part of me wishes there was a law that companies had to implement checks that their customers read and understood the agreement. Timers, making sure people had each line of text on the screen for a sufficient amount of time, and line by line video explainers. Just to expose the ridiculousness of it all.
This there seems to be more video only, nonskippable training that make sure you spend an hour watching. For now, running them in a vm in the background works.
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Part of me wishes there was a law that companies had to implement checks that their customers read and understood the agreement. Timers, making sure people had each line of text on the screen for a sufficient amount of time, and line by line video explainers. Just to expose the ridiculousness of it all.
It seems corporate training is testing this out. This there seems to be more video only, nonskippable training that make sure you spend an hour watching. For now, running them in a vm in the background works.