101–110 of 458 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Not to mention the unreasonable length and complexity of these things. I’ve seen shorter contracts for mergers and acquisitions.
The pro tip is pasting such long ToS into NotebookLM and asking it to list e.g. top 5 surprising clauses (if you ask just about surprising clauses it treats you like an idiot and lists everything)
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> The entire notion of being allowed to enforce arbitrary terms of service is absurd. There are probably a handful of terms everyone agrees are reasonable (no attempted hacking, rate limits, do not break laws) and everything else should be unenforceable. Why? Why should a government prohibit private parties from agreeing to anything other than those 3 things? > Especially garbage like what you're allowed to do with t…
Because the power is disproportionally concentrated with one party - the service provider. The users of the service are numerous, comparatively small and uncoordinated. In a situation like that, users have no means of resisting egregious terms, and no you cannot pull up stuff like "if you don't like it, don't buy it". As I wrote, the users are uncoordinated, and would take a huge effort to coordinate. Boycotting serv…
> The government is not there just to enforce laws, but also to legislate such that the scales are balanced. Otherwise we may as well live in a dictatorship.
Should the state just prohibit all agreements between two parties unless the state's adjudicator decides they are exactly equal in "power" and permits it? Sounds horrific, like a dictatorship. The government is not my guardian and does not do my thinking for me. I get that many people are subservient and would much prefer that, but that's no good either. There's an enormous middle ground between anarchy and "the state intervenes to allegedly 'balance the scales' in every aspect of peoples' private lives".
lol what a load of crap.. since when can a contract be changed by one side only without the other one signing it off?
email is notorious for arbitrarily not being delivered due to "spam/scam" filters misclassifying things
IMHO the problem is allowing changes to terms and conditions for existing contracts. If I have a contract with a company, that contract was made under existing T&C. The company should not be able to change those conditions without my explicit permission. Denying me service if I disagree should not be a valid option. I get this periodically on our overly-computerized car: Here are new T&C, click yes to agree. You can…
The other side of this is that companies do want to change their T&C from time to time, so what do they do, force you to quit and then sign up again? That adds a lot of friction. Or do they tag things and say "Customer X signed up on this date, so he is bound by T&C number 12, whereas this other customer signed up a year later and is bound by T&C number 13". That seems unwieldy since there is a common infrastructure.…
Of course you do. I have a fixed contract with my mobile carrier - if they want to change rates, tough luck. Once the current contract expires, they can indeed notify me that the new contract will auto-renew with a new rate, and I can either accept it or choose a new carrier. But they very much can't change prices, or alter services rendered, while the current contract is in force.
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I do not think this is true for Sweden. The key difference, is that the US is many jurisdictions (Federal + 50 states + a lot of others, from counties to cities to territories to MANY others), and the variance amongst those is high. The key thing well regulated places like Sweden get right, is that in consumer contracts you have minimum bars that you must meet regardless of what you can get the consumer to agree to.…
>The key thing well regulated places like Sweden get right, is that in consumer contracts you have minimum bars that you must meet regardless of what you can get the consumer to agree to. So, for instance, return policies, for goods bought online have minimum standards they must meet. Yes, but Swedish contract law actually is like this. A contract is a specific agreement, it can never be "Oh well, you can add provisi…
The entire notion of being allowed to enforce arbitrary terms of service is absurd. There are probably a handful of terms everyone agrees are reasonable (no attempted hacking, rate limits, do not break laws) and everything else should be unenforceable. Especially garbage like what you're allowed to do with the stuff you get from the service even while not using the service , or about setting up competing products. It…
> The entire notion of being allowed to enforce arbitrary terms of service is absurd. There are probably a handful of terms everyone agrees are reasonable (no attempted hacking, rate limits, do not break laws) and everything else should be unenforceable. Why? Why should a government prohibit private parties from agreeing to anything other than those 3 things? > Especially garbage like what you're allowed to do with t…
Because a severe power imbalance allows for abuse, and governments should prohibit such abuse.
The entire notion of being allowed to enforce arbitrary terms of service is absurd. There are probably a handful of terms everyone agrees are reasonable (no attempted hacking, rate limits, do not break laws) and everything else should be unenforceable. Especially garbage like what you're allowed to do with the stuff you get from the service even while not using the service , or about setting up competing products. It…
> The entire notion of being allowed to enforce arbitrary terms of service is absurd. There are probably a handful of terms everyone agrees are reasonable (no attempted hacking, rate limits, do not break laws) and everything else should be unenforceable. Why? Why should a government prohibit private parties from agreeing to anything other than those 3 things? > Especially garbage like what you're allowed to do with t…
> I'm not saying any term should be enforceable. Contract law has a long history against that. I just wonder how and where you draw the line and what existing law is insufficient.
This is not a magic list of 3 things that I think is complete.
I think there is a compromise between allowing companies to add arbitrary terms, including some which are enforceable but (by my feeling) unreasonable, and excluding unreasonable terms completely with a blanket ban, which no doubt would result in some companies being unable to add reasonable terms that are not in the list.
I think if we picked the 3 terms I outlined in my comment, the result would be a more pleasant situation than the one we have.
You could just say I disagree about what is an enforceable term. The point of the analogy is to show how ridiculous I find the current judicial reasoning, which is something along the lines of "if you don't like the term, you don't have to use the service, so it doesn't really matter how restrictive the terms are". I really think this is how particularly US judges think about this sort of thing, and I think it does a lot of harm to society. People find it obviously unreasonable for McDonalds to say how you can eat your burger, or for a book store to say what you can do with the information in your book, but when a service tells you how you can use the data you get from them, it's fair game. It's ethically inconsistent.
"I do not agree with your new TOS and will continue under your old TOS, and I will continue to use your service". And see when they will close your account down.
by reading or not reading this comment, you imply consent for me to access, manipulate, and/or assume control of any of your checking and savings accounts, investments, stocks, bonds, options, futures, securities, lines of credit, and real estate that you hold now or may acquire in the future, regardless of my chosen method or manner of access. disputes arising from any such activity shall be arbitrated by me. you ma…
You're going to run into problems with the concept of an unconscionable contract.
Agreeing to say, forced arbitration with a company, because you signed up for say, their streaming service, is obviously unconscionable. What would be even worse if those TOS said that you have to go into arbitration in matters unrelated to the streaming service.
Yet, this is what's happening. Disney used such an agreement (obtained through Disney+ TOS) when a man sued them on behalf of his dead wife, who died in their parks. It's common practice now to have these clauses in TOS, e.g. Discord has it too.