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…
Not to mention the unreasonable length and complexity of these things. I’ve seen shorter contracts for mergers and acquisitions.
Exactly. I don't understand how a community such as this, as connected as it is, can't back channel a message to Google brass to do something about these lockouts, which occur frequently and are unnecessary. There is no way Google doesn't know about them. Gmail is an essential piece of pervasive personal infrastructure, upon which hundreds of millions of people rely. People are losing irreplaceable data for lack of c…
The cost of adding a support desk outweighs any potential profit, I would imagine by a huge amount given accounts are ‘free’. It’s not that the executive don’t know, it’s that they don’t care.
If they weren't making enough money from having people use their "free" accounts, they wouldn't offer them.
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…
Here in Sweden the thing that makes something a contract is that you can't change it-- that it has definite provisions that have been agreed and that both parties actually expect the other to hold up their part.
The US breaking its contract law to treat non-contracts as contracts is one of the most insane things I've seen a legal system do to itself.
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…
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)
well, I hope the companies doing that have someone watching contact@ to cut my acces when I send my version of thr updated terms of service, since allowing my usage can imply consent. Right?
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…
Here in Sweden the thing that makes something a contract is that you can't change it-- that it has definite provisions that have been agreed and that both parties actually expect the other to hold up their part. The US breaking its contract law to treat non-contracts as contracts is one of the most insane things I've seen a legal system do to itself.
Presumable in Sweeden you can agree to new contract that supercedes the current one? That's all that's (argueable) happening here.
To me the insane part is that contracts don't have to be registered with the courts (or some qualified third party) ahead of time.
Like each party could show up with their own piece of paper (or not be able to provide it). Which is largely the issue here in that one party is showing up with a 2021 document and the other a 2023 document.
For those not familiar with US appeals courts, this is an unpublished order, which means that it's (broadly speaking; there are subtleties) not precedent and applies to this case alone.
Isn't the fact that it applies to _any_ case precedent?
Like if you're a lawyer and you read this do you go "My client will never win a case like this?" or do you go "we should go to trial"?
Sure you won't get summary judgement but if the courts rule this way once they can rule this way again.
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…
Here in Sweden the thing that makes something a contract is that you can't change it-- that it has definite provisions that have been agreed and that both parties actually expect the other to hold up their part. The US breaking its contract law to treat non-contracts as contracts is one of the most insane things I've seen a legal system do to itself.
This is not true. It is 100% possible to write a contract in Sweden where one of the paragraphs says that you can change it in this and that way. And if we're talking about business to business contracts, it will probably in almost all cases be enforceable, even if you're writing that one party can just announce changes. In fact, I think most business to business contracts have some kind of clause specifying that it is possible to raise prices or change certain things.