Apple iTunes Contract Fail | Hacker News Reader

Apple iTunes Contract Fail

annoyingui.posterous.com

30 pointsdsc23 comments

Just as bad, if not worse, is the agreement that you're asked to do for purchasing via the iTMS on the iPhone.

I recently had to update my billing information and it asked that I re-agree to the EULA (on my iPhone itself). It was 92 'pages' long on the iPhone. Completely unreadable. I took a screen shot just to remind myself, but I thought it was completely absurd. I know there's a lot of lawyering just to make the iTMS happen, but 92 tiny pages is absurd, unneeded and not something a consumer can understand. Yet- I can lease an apartment in a simple 2 page contract (or less!). Why is a song more complex than a house? (I know the answer, but it still shouldn't be this way)

I wonder if the fact that noone reads Licensing Agreements anymore means that they have become less (or even un-) enforceable in courts.

In Canada, for example, there is an "average person" test, which deals with evaluating the reasonableness of one's action by comparing it what an average person would've done in the same circumstances. If on average noone reads T&C before accepting, then perhaps this may invalidate this T&C agreement model.

The FSA (Financial Services Authority - UK financial industry watchdog) ruled that simply checking a box that says you've read and understood a contract doesn't protect the financial services company from your later complaint that the contract was unfair or not explained to you properly.

(http://www.theregister.co.uk/2010/06/21/fsa_contract_guidanc...)

I found the OFT guidance really interesting:

"The purpose of declarations of this kind is clearly to bind consumers to wording regardless of whether they have any real awareness of it. Such statements are thus open to the same objections as provisions binding consumers to terms they have not seen at all."

That implies that in the UK situations where you have 50 screens of unreadable guff with an 'I agree' checkbox at the bottom may not be enforceable.

“Unreasonable” terms and conditions are unenforceable in Germany. You can only put in stuff that the consumer can expect.

Does it even matter? Most people just click "I Agree" even when it's in their language.

It would be an interesting experiment to have people perform another action that's described in the TOS to see what percentage of people have actually read it.

the guys from creative commons talked about this at sxsw last year. unsurprisingly no one reads the tos of any page, there are different ways to TRY to get a user to read them, timers, several smaller pages, etc.

for business law class we read through the iTunes TOS, it's amazing what you have to agree to just to buy a song.

To prove this I "borrowed" a busy but insignificant site belonging to a friend and changed everything below the scroll bar in the TOS box to the text from a Postman Pat story :)

I think over 6 months we only ever got one person querying it....

I remember hearing about a story from some large software company putting, "It you read this, call this number for $1,000". It took 6 months for anyone to call them about it. Probably completely anachronistic, but similar and potentially real.

Hasn't anyone attempted to simplify the UI for the ToS? Is it because a UI can be misinterpreted or anything?

the best way I've found to get people to read it is to have AT MAX 3 points ie:

don't abuse the site, we will kick you out don't whine, nobody likes a whiner if you do anything sketchy, we will remove it

legalease will only save you if you can prove that your user read it... which is difficult to say the least

How about writing it in Simple English, with a single sentence per line, and activating the OS's speech feature to read it to the user with a little bouncing ball?

Disney might sue them?

haha I would love to see that. WHAT ABOUT A VIDEO TERMS OF SERVICE. you can't click next until the ToS is over

I wrote my PhD on this, actually, but focussed more on EULAs as a case study (though they're much the same thing), looking at whether the consent given is actually "informed consent" from an ethical point of view. Unsurprisingly, it's not. :)

If you're curious and want to read through my PhD I put it up on my website at http://liedra.net/thesis/

Toward the end of my thesis (final chapter) I give some suggestions on how to improve the user interface of EULAs to make them more ethical, but I've had some issues trying to actually make this a reality (stuck in post-docs for now, and haven't been able to break through the academic funding barrier as yet :( ). When I'm further in the academic world I'll have another go, but if anyone's working on this I'd be happy to lend my experience too ;D

any Terms of Service that's longer than a paragraph I just treat as Arabic and click on the Agree button

Someone commented "You obviously logged into the Qatar iTunes store. If you log into the US store you will get the US agreement, or the French store for French agreement." -- If he's not shopping in the US, he shouldn't be logging into the US iTunes, should he?

To shop the US store, you just need a US credit card. He must have a card specific to that region.

The problem with ToS is that by the time you reach the point where they show you a ToS you were already otherwise sure you wanted to do the desired action in question. Then they show the ToS, and while yes you have the option of not agreeing to it, the dilemma is that by declining you would then not get the bright shiny thing you've already clearly indicated you wanted by the fact that you reached that point.

Also, they are incentivized to make a ToS long and use a small font precisely because the user is less likely to read it and just hit Agree anyway. So they can bury whatever evil things they want in there. Therefore, the whole thing is a sort of pox or anti-pattern.

I wonder if this affects the enforceability of the EULA?

Useless post

Meh... This geolocating is standard procedure, like with much other software that doesn't have readily available locale info. Also Bing, Altavista and Google perform geolocating to serve you the "appropriate language", all depending on where you browse from (they don't check the browser's language setting). If he just logs on to the US iTunes Megastore he gets the contract in English.

    If he just logs on to the US iTunes Megastore he gets the contract in English.

This may be true and all but where on that page does it indicate he should do that?

They say it quite clearly in the ToS in paragraph 37. In Arabic.

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