If any lawyers from the future are reading this: It was impossible for me to see what I was agreeing to. Furthermore, I was not given a chance to not agree with these (unknown) changes.
Iirc there was (is?) a site which gives a rating to the various license agreements of popular services and the like, so maybe it’s a solved problem?
Cherenkov radiation for the masses I say.
If it’s some other piece of software, you can go to a package repository such as the AUR [1] or Chocolatey [2], and leave a comment for the package even if it’s non-free.
If it’s a pure SaaS, there’s little you can do though, apart from tweeting, word-of-mouth, or Google reviews.
This there seems to be more video only, nonskippable training that make sure you spend an hour watching. For now, running them in a vm in the background works.
Basically you can't sneak gotchas into a ToS, you have to make sure users know they're violating a rule. Ironically this is unlike actual laws where ignorance is not an excuse even if the law is weird and unexpected.
> Ironically this is unlike actual laws where ignorance is not an excuse
I think it's similar to real laws.
Unacceptable rules: sneaking in terms such as that your firstborn child will belong to me is not enforceable: nobody could expect or would agree to that. In law, similarly, you can't just upend someone's life for a minor infraction, or indeed take a child in exchange for your use of an ordinary government service. If this were to pass, a court would strike it down based on human rights or constitution, so you'd have to change/disavow those also as a country.
Acceptable rules: sneaking in terms that are fair are enforceable. Your third party client ban is an example where the rule is acceptable, but the consequences deemed disproportionate and so a warning is in order before cutting one off. This is similar to many laws, for example mildly dangerous driving gets you a fine or few days/weeks of driving ban. It takes repeat offences to get banned outright. Failure to pay taxes doesn't result in them showing up to auction your TV off, but they send a nice letter first, even if they'll eventually show up with a writ and after you're been warned that this is the next step, because indeed, we don't expect everyone to know everything.
I'm not a lawyer and can't cite relevant cases or anything, but this is my impression of law as a lay person. It's rarely perfectly fair towards everyone in all situations, and I think we should pay even more heed to "but how was I supposed to know"s whenever a situation is legitimately complex and good intent was shown (to avoid that people avoid doing good things because they don't know what legal risk it puts them in, such as what good samaritan laws are aimed to avoid), but it does try to find balances between what people can reasonably know and follow, at least in northwestern Europe which I'm most familiar with.
Yeah, that's the theory. But what a judge will decide qualifies for "minor" may or may not align with what is sane or what most people believe, and this gets worse and worse if you go into higher courts with politically appointed judges.
On practice governments upend people lives all the time, even for presumed infractions that may not be there at all.
Edit: from a place like Germany as the person above was talking about, to be clear. If such things are trivial to find in the USA would not surprise me in the slightest
There is a lot to be learned in this regard from financial products online. Most of them have built in functionality to let users know what they are doing and the associated risk.
Note that this also requires the user to be informed about what they will have to pay before they click the button. No bullshit surprise charges or hidden fees, mostly.
This is very interesting. Thanks for sharing.
I would not do that.
I think the problem is with the consumer, not the producer.
Practically what this means is that it is useless to negotiate with big companies or really even read their terms (unless you have skills to spot errors) - the best one can do is support campaigns for expanded privacy laws, consumer rights etc.
c.f. the whole "video calls to train their AI at Zoom" (later: "unless you opt out", sorta) pullava ...
Is this your solution?
What else is there for corporate email?
(But you should think twice whether working for a legal entity where no people know legal stuff is a good idea)
Ut more importantly, you have no right to Microsoft products, and it regularly blows my mind when people try to argue otherwise.
Besides, if your beliefs are so incompatible with society that they exclude you from holding down a job, that belief becomes a pathology, not a conviction. Understanding how to operate successfully in society is a critical part of being an adult.
Microsoft goes to great lengths to court primary education systems to instill themselves as the "taught software stack". You say no one has any right to Microsoft's products... Then does that not run into somewhat of a public contradiction when public education systems shove it down students throats?
In point of fact, it sounds like the publically taught option should be exclusively GPL or other FLOSS software offerings, because contrary to your assertion, every student does have an implicit right to those as a public good.
If you want to nationalize Microsoft, petition your congressperson to do so.
But it is interesting to note how we got here.
https://www.npr.org/2023/07/13/1187543648/terms-and-conditio...
To summarize the podcast episode, contracts used to be individually tailored, but businesses found that too onerous and just wrote boilerplate contracts for all customers to sign. Then they decided the signing part became too onerous for businesses so courts decided that using the product was enough to agree to terms. So now we’re at a point where not using the product is legitimately the only way not to agree to whatever terms the company decides.
after all, you can argue/haggle/negotiate with a myriad of software developer firms (who are happy to build and operate a bespoke service for you). you can also do the same with many service providers, all you need is a big enough order and they are eager to give discounts. big enough check and you can pick and choose T&C too.
free market or not, market forces, mostly supply-and-demand and barriers to entry and costs lead to very few choices.
however, it's likely that the accumulation of software technology and decreasing costs will make a lot more features available in service form.
It seems like society would be better off if the law were set up to where only when clear communication has happened that the lawyer would bring benefit to their employer.
The problem is contracts of adhesion are inherently unconscionable, as are contracts that require signing away rights without consideration (above and beyond the use of the service). If you’re doing something with the data beyond providing the service (in a GDPR sense) then there needs to be an actual consideration to the customer for the resulting profit above and beyond the use of the service.
People primarily buy on cost, they’ll buy whatever is $10 cheaper. And in a truly efficient market this would be passed along to the consumer and people would buy the one that’s cheaper with worse tos - just like people buy ad-loaded smart tvs instead of a premium one with no telemetry or smarts or a tos attached.
Regulation is the only thing that’s gonna get you there. Contracts of adhesion are not gonna go away on their own unless you outlaw them. The market isn’t efficient like that, even if it were the efficient scenario is likely there one favoring cheapness and contracts of adhesion over consumer friendly behavior, and the behavior is unconscionable anyway. Just outlaw it.
The libertarian take on regulation is wrong, there’s a reason the EU does its consumer regulation with regulations and not with labeling. And in this case it’s actually contract law that is being warped by anticompetitive participants so you’d really think even the libertarians would be on board. A contract without consideration is not a contract, literally. And “we’re not going to let you use the good/service that you already paid for” is not a consideration, it’s blackmail and strongarm robbery.
Annotations don't work with legal code because there is a real risk the interpreter might use the escaped comments unexpectedly as production code(!). Imagine your C and C++ comments could generate production errors. You probably wouldn't use them much.
There's an argument for giving people a sheet of hypothetical inputs and projected code outputs when we're talking contracts. Biz gives you the 'code' and then in a separate sheet say: hypothetically, a shady backwater adtech company asks for your mother's maiden name; are we allowed to sell it without further consent? And then they give the code output: "Yes, we can do whatever we want." And they go through a list of these hypothetical.
The counterargument is such a sheet could be even more mind-numbing and unwieldy than the original code if not written in an entirely new spirit.
And FWIW, my personal view is that these 70-page contracts of adhesion are a travesty, an evolutionary step, and a weak fiction at this point. The industry does not have a right to force 3 months of mandatory bedtime reading for their userbase every few months, the whole thing is broken and we're all just waiting for courts to coalesce around a better model.