For mandatory T&Cs I'll put in the signature box "Decline", including updating the HTML page to say "decline" instead of "OK" and screenshotting it or modifying the HTTP response sent back to include riders.
I know it probably won't matter, but it's kind of fun for me.
And keep in mind that (at least in the US) the opposite of "I accept the terms and conditions" is not "I get to do whatever I want," it's "I am accessing this service without authorization, which is a crime under the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act."
>No chance that would hold up in court. Clickwraps have been tested in courts and are fully enforceable.
there may be no chance it would hold up in court, but not for the reason you say. it would have be be because "any words on on a modified document "signature" line would be taken as a signature" or "subverting a clickwrap license is theft of services" or whatever.
that "agreed" clickwrap licenses have been found enforceable is a separate fact about a separate issue.
I envy the rigor and time investment, but I'm inclined to agree: there are unenforceable contracts, but I'm not aware of any case in which denying t&c's while using a service deliberately was successfully defended as compatible?
I'm not a lawyer though, I'm not even that well-informed about everyday law stuff for laymen.
Their heroku setup is having a moment. But if this is about the game I've been playing with my rude ass car that started nagging me about Kia's t&c update, weeks after i first got it, every time i start the engine...
I'm not sure if I'm winning and I'm not sure if the game is fun anymore. at least the car and I have been playing a single game of me declining the t&c and please ask me again later for some three years and a few months now. So the replay value is high.
Also sometimes my wife pretends to go for the "accept" button and it makes me all hot and bothered
If you're in Europe, then most new cars do that right now. There was an EU-wide court case some time ago whether tracking consent can be one-and-done in a car or not because different people can be driving a car at different times, if memory serves well. Rather than simply drop the tracking, the car manufacturers decided to just nag you every time. This is now the first thing on my list when looking for a new car, if they do stuff like that I'm not buying.
Mozilla did an expose a while back on what's hidden in those terms, IIRC. Things like "we want to know do you use the heated seats" (okay... useful free market research maybe) but also "we store personality profiles including your sexual preferences"
Somewhere I hope a PM is deliberating the intricacies of automotive teledildonics. I hope.
As long as you had the opportunity to read them, you and the company are bound by them even if it is clear you never read them. Surprising terms and conditions are always voidable. There is a whole large list of voidable stipulations. I prefer Canadian law (this differs by province) where voidable stipulations invalidate the contract to a standard contract on the other hand.
There should be a master book of civil contracts that can be filled out in a "Mad Libs" sort of way, but nothing else is legally enforcable. Every sales contract or employment term is the same with only narrow, permitted variations.
This could streamline the legal system because it turns potentially infinite contract designs into a much more constrained problem space. You'd quickly build enough precedent that even lay people could understand the mechanism.
Trying to add a new term would require revising the master book, which would be a very public and political process that would likely shame the instigator (just why are you so desperate to force arbitration?)
The whole "contracts are a voluntary, negotiated, meeting of the minds" perspective feels quaint and 1700s, from an era before billion-dollar companies, and even before formal law schools. Negotiations are rarely between equal parties on a level footing these days.
The problem as I see it, when people start offering novel services it is hard to have a ready made contract for that. Hence the idea of reasonability and voidability that so many people have forgotten. If the term is clearly unbalanced in favor of the controlling party (ability to terminate the contract at any time without penalty while the contractee faces a penalty for early termination) without some specific consideration for this imbalance. These general reasonability notions need to be enforced more agressively. Instead, too many people think that anything goes once you signed the contract, but at the extreme end of this, slavery is clearly illegal. So there is clearly a line where you cannot agree to unreasonable things, but people forget that.
So I think these reasonability clauses were our attempt to capture novel contracts, but they have lost their teeth in the minds of people and in our legal systems. Then I start to entertain the enumerated contracts approach again...
Broken for me, but going off of the headline, I have been playing the same game with Apple Health. Refuse to accept what probably gives them some wiggle room to monetize my health information. Which also means that I cannot setup a wake up alarm, only generic alarms.
It hallucinates on sites that have simple terms that say we don't collect anything or has minimal collections like IP navigation history to check bad actors which are auto removed.
I would assume that if it can't handle understanding two paragraphs, it's worthless to be run on a 30+ page TOS.
Readit News
I know it probably won't matter, but it's kind of fun for me.
there may be no chance it would hold up in court, but not for the reason you say. it would have be be because "any words on on a modified document "signature" line would be taken as a signature" or "subverting a clickwrap license is theft of services" or whatever.
that "agreed" clickwrap licenses have been found enforceable is a separate fact about a separate issue.
Deleted Comment
I'm not a lawyer though, I'm not even that well-informed about everyday law stuff for laymen.
I'm not sure if I'm winning and I'm not sure if the game is fun anymore. at least the car and I have been playing a single game of me declining the t&c and please ask me again later for some three years and a few months now. So the replay value is high.
Also sometimes my wife pretends to go for the "accept" button and it makes me all hot and bothered
Somewhere I hope a PM is deliberating the intricacies of automotive teledildonics. I hope.
http://www.dutchcivillaw.com/civilcodebook066.htm
As long as you had the opportunity to read them, you and the company are bound by them even if it is clear you never read them. Surprising terms and conditions are always voidable. There is a whole large list of voidable stipulations. I prefer Canadian law (this differs by province) where voidable stipulations invalidate the contract to a standard contract on the other hand.
There should be a master book of civil contracts that can be filled out in a "Mad Libs" sort of way, but nothing else is legally enforcable. Every sales contract or employment term is the same with only narrow, permitted variations.
This could streamline the legal system because it turns potentially infinite contract designs into a much more constrained problem space. You'd quickly build enough precedent that even lay people could understand the mechanism.
Trying to add a new term would require revising the master book, which would be a very public and political process that would likely shame the instigator (just why are you so desperate to force arbitration?)
The whole "contracts are a voluntary, negotiated, meeting of the minds" perspective feels quaint and 1700s, from an era before billion-dollar companies, and even before formal law schools. Negotiations are rarely between equal parties on a level footing these days.
The problem as I see it, when people start offering novel services it is hard to have a ready made contract for that. Hence the idea of reasonability and voidability that so many people have forgotten. If the term is clearly unbalanced in favor of the controlling party (ability to terminate the contract at any time without penalty while the contractee faces a penalty for early termination) without some specific consideration for this imbalance. These general reasonability notions need to be enforced more agressively. Instead, too many people think that anything goes once you signed the contract, but at the extreme end of this, slavery is clearly illegal. So there is clearly a line where you cannot agree to unreasonable things, but people forget that.
So I think these reasonability clauses were our attempt to capture novel contracts, but they have lost their teeth in the minds of people and in our legal systems. Then I start to entertain the enumerated contracts approach again...
I didn't enable JavaScript. Does that mean I win?
Sure, Apple is less bad than many others, but that does not mean they are trustworthy.
https://web.archive.org/web/20250625181250/https://www.terms...
it takes a good 5-10 minutes to boot up
I created this web application to review the terms and conditions of website and show an LLM surface the ugly parts of the TOS.
tosreview.org/
Shoutout: this was inspired by the amazing humans at tosdr.org
I would assume that if it can't handle understanding two paragraphs, it's worthless to be run on a 30+ page TOS.