Copyright is actually a perfect example of this. In order to send my photo over the Internet to other people who want to view it, you need much more than the legal right to display my picture. Sending a picture over the Internet involves copying, distributing, and sublicensing the image countless numbers of times. So any site with user-uploaded content will have something very close to (Imgur's for reference):
> With regard to any file or content you upload to the public portions of our site, you grant Imgur a non-exclusive, royalty-free, perpetual, irrevocable worldwide license (with sublicense and assignment rights) to use, to display online and in any present or future media, to create derivative works of, to allow downloads of, and/or distribute any such file or content.
There's no way the typical user will understand this, but that's not because it's obfuscated. The typical user just doesn't have the background to understand what all these rights are or why Imgur requires them. It would be severely misleading to write the literal meaning in layperson's terms:
> When you upload pictures, you have to give us the right to make as many copies of the pictures as we want, modify them however we'd like, and send those copies to whoever we want anywhere in the world.
But isn't it precisely what the legalese means? I mean, unless otherwise restrict by some law other than the copyright laws, Imgur can use those images for anything. The statement does not limits the use to "reasonable business activities". Why will it be severely misleading to write it that way?
They could try going into detail:
> We can send copies of your image to anyone who, following standard Internet routing protocols, says that someone has requested to see the image and promises to forward the copy onwards to the original requester. Anyone we send the image to can also create copies themselves following this rule, and can temporarily store the copies as needed to make further copies.
But then neither the average Joe nor lawyers are going to be able to understand it.
But how do we know this? If they intend something, they should write that down in the contract. I am having hard time imagining that their lawyers cannot draw a contract which waives only the copyright requirement for the purposes of image hosting and restricts the images from being used for other things. The principle of charitable interpretation tells me to believe what people/company write in their contract. In my opinion, the expansive definition in the contract is there to
a) Save their ass when they do something which does not seems kosher to the public.
b) Allows them to pivot to other use of the data which might have nothing related to their current business model.
c) It is cost effective to draw up the contract in this way, given the current legal system and its requirements.
Note that I am not saying that Imgur is doing something immoral or whatever. I am just saying that if they wrote down this
> When you upload pictures, you have to give us the right to make as many copies of the pictures as we want, modify them however we'd like, and send those copies to whoever we want anywhere in the world.
as the simplified legalese, that it is the current interpretation. I contend that the average Joe will have better understanding of the _current_ contract with the simplified statement. I also think that Imgur (and other services) will find money to draft a better contract if they were required to make a simplified language version.
My gut feeling (of which I have no proof) is that the current legal system is costing more money to the society than is necessary. For one thing, it is decreasing the trust in the legal system, since people now (correctly) assume that in many facets of modern life, they are agreeing to things they don't understand, that they are giving up more rights than they should, and that there is no reasonable solution to this problem yet.
Some complication in the law is necessary since the world is a complex creature, but I think that the common person (say at least half of the population) should have reasonable understanding of the legal language. One way to approach it is to have a requirement for simpler contract, but I don't know if it is _the_ way to deal with this problem. I am not a lawyer after all. All I know is that something is broken, and if not fixed, will lead to more problem down the line. A system like this where no-one trusts nobody is clearly not sustainable. It's just not a good way to organize as a society.
Seems easy enough to write.
The reason doesn't matter if they are claiming those rights. So the given layman terms version is still true.