7 ms·

It's not just the length of the initial contract, it's the lack of a sane "diff" system. Even if someone is willing and able to read a 44 page contract the fir

• waqf 11y ago
  We didn't solve this type of thing for the adversarial case. If contracts became easily electronically diffable, then companies who didn't want their diffs comprehensible would randomly move sentences around and substitute words in every version of their contracts.
  • anfedorov 11y ago
    Perhaps one could legislate that legally immaterial changes have to be kept in separate commits than legally material changes, and that those have to be as atomic as is reasonable.
  • MichaelBurge 11y ago
    I feel like the more difficult problem is getting every company to use some kind of electronic system to store versions of legal documents. Actually diffing two documents in any format is much simpler, even against an adversarial company. I have to imagine that the companies would at least be paying more for lawyers to shuffle contracts around like that than to amend them slightly.
• ccvannorman 11y ago
  Yeah, the "diff" is a big one. There should be 5-10 major types of contracts that companies can work from, and consumers should be told "This is contract 5. The diff is as follows:" and limit the diff in length
  • thrownaway2424 11y ago
    Some states have this. In Texas for example there is a statewide standard residential lease contract. When you rent property in Texas you know what you're getting into.
    • ende 11y ago
      Ive been trying to think of an effective way of regulating these sorts of contacts through legislation, and what you're describing seems like the simplest route. Simply have the public draft the standard contractual templates on behalf of consumers/employees/tenants that companies/employers/landlords are constrained to use.
      • icebraining 11y ago
        Unless there's any reason to think the corps would have any less influence on that than they have on the laws that allow them to get people to waive their rights to sue - and why would they? - that sounds like a great way to prevent customers from escaping abusive conditions. As a good example, the aforementioned Texas agreement seems to have a clause that states that the landlord can enter the property at any time without previous notice. Preventing the landlord from giving up that right is not a good thing.
        • ende 11y ago
          Good point. I'm not even really one to turn to legislative remedies. It's difficult to imagine many practical ways to match the vast legal resources of these established interests against individuals.
• branchless 11y ago
  They should just tell companies if they cannot describe the legal situation in under a page in a clear language for general consumer products then they cannot sell them. Diffs won't help - the aim from version 1.0 is to obfuscate.
  • jjoonathan 11y ago
    1 page is plenty long to bury unconscionable landmines in, especially for the party controlling UX. Until courts are ready to legislate UX, the better approach is to legislatively augment the court's "soft" power to void contracts that a reasonable person would "sign" without reading. Vague as hell, yes, but it fixes the incentive landscape without leaving obvious loopholes: longer and harder to read = more enforcement risk. Also, this principle already exists and has a decent track record. Which is why my lease is 3 pages long, simple, and relatively landmine-free (I had to initial key clauses) while my iTunes contract is 50 page long, impenetrable, and landmine rich. The principle just needs to be strengthened & applied in the tech world.
    • branchless 11y ago
      It's simply a symptom of the wider problem that is a scourge of all our lives: - states are on the side of corporations not the people
      • jessaustin 11y ago
        The farmer has never been "on the side" of the pigs and cattle. In precise analogy, the state has never been "on the side" of the people.
        • jessaustin 11y ago
          Wow, not many history buffs here on HN. Lots of credulous junior-high civics students, though.
          • 11y ago
• pearlsteinj 11y ago
  The only way to bring about that kind of change is from the regulatory level, the companies benefit from obfuscating the changes they're making you agree to. Making it easier to see that they just added a single provision allowing them to sell your data is not something companies will want to implement themselves.
• djcapelis 11y ago
  I get to have this experience with one of my banks. And all I need to do to stay updated with the terms is click watch on the github repo. It's the way things should be. https://github.com/SimpleFinance/policies https://github.com/SimpleFinance/policies
  • jsprogrammer 11y ago
    Exactly what I want to be doing all day: watching my bank's github repo and trying to keep up with their ever changing policies. Edit: Mentally tracking and integrating policy reversions[0] sounds like a good time as well. [0] https://github.com/SimpleFinance/policies/commit/b0a644035fb0dfcf056cb525405de1ad3c8fe029 https://github.com/SimpleFinance/policies/commit/b0a644035fb...
  • lobster_johnson 11y ago
    Simple looks incredible. Is it as great as it looks?
    • Imagenuity 11y ago
      Simple is terrific. I've been using it for about a year and 1/2. If you are already used to paying all your bills online, then this is right for you.
    • ctide 11y ago
      It depends. I tried to switch to Simple, but at the time I was working as an independent contractor. The maximum size of a check you can deposit without mailing it to them is $3k. Having to mail in every check I received was a hassle that outweighed any benefits Simple provided over a regular bank account.
      • wpietri 11y ago
        For what it's worth, last time I was doing independent contractor work, I used a billing firm, MBO Partners. They took 4% of my gross and treated me as a W2 employee. My taxes would come out of the gross, as would any benefits I elected. The rest would get direct deposited like a normal paycheck. I would have spent more than 4% of my time screwing around with paperwork, so I thought it a pretty good deal. I suspect there are other firms like this, but I liked 'em enough that I used them for 8 years or so without ever looking for alternatives.
• jcfrei 11y ago
  Why doesn't somebody just create a git repository with contracts from major companies and push changes whenever they appear? Link to a subreddit that discusses said changes and voilà you get a little more transparency. Or am I missing something?
  • nitrogen 11y ago
    Contracts are probably subject to copyright, which means the DMCA could shut down such a repo.
    • srtjstjsj 11y ago
      A fair use claim should defend it. Understanding a contract is necessary for complying with it.
• nickff 11y ago
  What if arbitration clauses are not a problem at all? There is a great deal of contradictory evidence with respect to whether arbitration is more or less favorable to consumers and employees (though it is definitely very bad for class-action lawyers). But even if we assume for the purpose of argument that consumers always lose disputes which are arbitrated, they may be willing to make that trade in exchange for reduced prices on goods and services, as well as higher salaries.
  • jcfrei 11y ago
    That's a good point. One could just argue that in time consumers will just favor contracts with companies that either don't have arbitration clauses or if they do the consumer doesn't care anyway about losing potential disputes. I think it's only really a problem when a company holds a (quasi) monopoly in a certain business. Like telcos do in the US in many states.
    • wpietri 11y ago
      One could argue that. But markets are mainly good at solving problems that occur frequently and with short feedback loops. The sort of problems that lead to class action lawsuits are rarely either, let alone both.
    • mark-r 11y ago
      You're assuming there will be a choice. A successful strategy tends to be copied. I doubt that any of the companies forcing you to agree to an arbitration clause have competitors that don't.
  • raj_o 11y ago
    They are a problem now. Absolute power corrupts absolutely. This is a one sided contract. Can you ever envision a contract solely drafted by one side to be beneficial to both sides? The only contradictory 'evidence' is talk about why it's better; that is, companies claim it's an easier and cheaper process. They fail to mention that what they mean is, it's easier and cheaper to them. As a consumer, I want the laws to be written by my elected politician, don't you? Sure, there's a lot of unfairness to it. But I can't imagine a selfish corporation, one that keeps claiming their only loyalty is the the share holder, will do much better. Just one example. You know VWs recent emission scandal? In the USA those people signed not only an arbitration agreement, but one that disallows class actions. You won't hear the problems that arbitration is causing because those problems won't make it to a court of law to be a problem.
• hackuser 11y ago
  It's an interesting idea, but I don't think it would accomplish anything. A major point of the article is that consumers and employees generally have no power to negotiate; even if you can read the contract easily, there's little you can do about it.
• rmc 11y ago
  And then abusive companies can just make a near unreadable diff. Rearrange all the sections in the document so that the diff is massive and unreadable.
  • srtjstjsj 11y ago
    That's a trivial challenge for a computer to solve.
• jellicle 11y ago
  Or we could just regulate sane minimums and then not have to worry about it at all.
• wanderingstan 11y ago
  And some sort of annotation/comment system for contracts, a la Rap Genius.
• kemitchell 11y ago
  I am a deals attorney and a programmer. I'd caution against conflating comparison tools like "diff" with Git and revision control more generally. Lawyers call change sets "redlines" rather than "diffs". Their use in the profession long predates modern computing. Word has a serviceable built-in diff tool called "Compare Documents", and many law firms license superior document comparison software. Prose diff is hard, and specialized law tools far surpass diff, wdiff, GitHub prose diff, &c. in areas like move detection and treatment of punctuation. Source code revision control systems are built for, and conducive to, modes of collaboration that only occasionally resemble legal practice. In the main, lawyers trade "patches" with commentary via e-mail, which is still the practice of some important open-source projects, like Git itself. (For a nice comparison of this workflow to "GitHub flow": http://zachholman.com/posts/git-commit-history/ http://zachholman.com/posts/git-commit-history/ . See also git-send-email and git-format-patch.) A developer might be tempted to squash commits to make a "pretty" patch. In an adversarial negotiation, hiding incremental revision history is essential for maintaining confidentiality and information advantage. If you're going to squash, anonymize, remove timestamps, &c. every time, Git is overhead and potentially dangerous. Git's architecture does not allow parallel, private histories for shared commits; you can't have your secrets and share them, too. Fortunately, there are two common situations where Git makes sense for legal docs: standard forms and public terms. GitHub is in active use in both those areas. A few pioneers, among them Jason Boehmig, whose Ironclad is a recent YC alum, and Casey Kuhlman, now of Eris Industries, have done work on "open" form contracts in plaintext markup tracked with Git. Jason lead the effort to make the Series Seed financing documents available on GitHub: https://github.com/seriesseed/equity https://github.com/seriesseed/equity I've followed in Jason's footsteps with an in-development community revision of Series Seed at https://github.com/seriesnext/seriesnext https://github.com/seriesnext/seriesnext and an experimental company-to-company NDA at https://github.com/obviousnda/obviousnda https://github.com/obviousnda/obviousnda (More announcements in this vein to come.) Casey's "Legal Markdown" and later writing for Eris were big inspiration for my current open-source work. Public terms, like terms of use, fall somewhere in between working on a standard form for the common good and negotiating a contentious agreement. On the one hand, what's good for the service provider may come at user expense, as with arbitration clauses or limits on liability. On the other hand, courts require that users at least have notice and a way to review changes made, and transparency goes a long way to earning user trust and avoiding PR blow-up. When the users on the other side are devs, Git makes a lot of sense. A number of developer-tools companies use version control to track their privacy policies, and sometimes other company policies. npm, Inc.'s policies, to give one example, are here: https://github.com/npm/policies https://github.com/npm/policies Many of these use GitHub's "prose diff" support for Markdown. If you're interested in terms of use, privacy policies, and the like, I've written about how my open-source work on "Common Form" (https://commonform.github.io https://commonform.github.io), a schema and content-addressing system for modular legal documents, will apply to those terms: http://writing.kemitchell.com/2015/08/24/TOS-Already-Read.html http://writing.kemitchell.com/2015/08/24/TOS-Already-Read.ht...