500px Terms of Service

At the top, it's explicitly stated:

  Before using any of the 500px services, you are required to
  read, understand and agree to these terms. You may only create
  an account after reading and accepting these terms. The column
  on the right provides a short explanation of the terms of use
  and is not legally binding.

Obligatory IANAL, but that explicit statement probably covers them from any potential liability from providing summaries.

I'm glad someone did this.

But I'm not sure that it really gives me any more confidence in my knowledge of the contractual agreement than if I hadn't read the TOS at all.

I think a company's TOS is based on the assumption that if the company tries to use their TOS to take advantage of lots of people, if one person finds out, everyone finds out. And the company has to answer.

If a company makes their TOS more readable, I'm still agreeing to the contract on the same assumption. It doesn't matter that I read it. What matters is that I legally bound myself to the TOS, not the summary.

What would be way cooler was if the TOS summary sections were curated by the masses (wikipedia style). See, that I would trust and I would be interested in reading.

Good legalese IS human readable. The point of legalese is to define everything in absolutely certain terms. Where words are given unusual or overly specific meanings, these meanings should be defined in the document. Legalese can be heavy going, but should never require any knowledge that 90% of the population doesn't already posses.

Of course, having a simplified version is still nice.

Well, for me it's not so much about readability but about verbosity. There's always so much boilerplate that I don't know where to look.

I wish there were some default TOS templates that everyone used, and their modifications were all in a different color or something. Or maybe if everyone used common building blocks of text that were modular. Kind of like how Creative Commons lets you build a license using different key parts (attribution, non-commercial, etc).

This is indeed a nice TOS but I've always been impressed by Tarsnap's legal section.

http://www.tarsnap.com/legal.html