5 ms·

On the other hand, I dont think victim-blaming is an excuse for rampant and continuous ignorance either. At some point, after getting abused again and again, us

On the other hand, I dont think victim-blaming is an excuse for rampant and continuous ignorance either. At some point, after getting abused again and again, users are to blame. All this shouldn't suprise any of them, it's in the ToS after all. Some users read the ToS and made an educated choice, some didn't read them and decided to not participate in any business with a company that obfuscates its goals in a 50-page wall of legal damage control, and some just ignore it and use the service. The ones that ignore the ToS and that get caught by suprise later are absolutely to blame for their own neglectance of the contract conditions.

Qahlel 6y ago
You cannot avoid the TOS. They are all designed to protect the seller not the buyer. On top of that, you -as a single consumer- has no choice to select parts of the TOS. It's a unilateral-contract by definition.
- f1refly 6y ago
  You, as a comsumer, always have the right to not accept the ToS and take your money elsewhere. Amazon fortunately doesn't have a monopoly on the ebook market.
  - leereeves 6y ago
    What store sells ebooks legally and doesn't have similar ToS?
    - f1refly 6y ago
      I usually go to the publishers or, if self published, authors website directly and buy from there. Books are distributed as epub that I can load on my ereader calibre alike.
      - sbarre 6y ago
        You keep saying this, but you leave out the fact that not that many publishers sell direct, and most popular books are not available in this manner. So yes this works _sometimes_, but not most of the time. For the majority of users who are looking for a very specific book, not just _any_ new book to read, buying it digitally means buying it from a DRM-laden marketplace.
      - falcolas 6y ago
        Amazon is also a publisher. Many books I’ve read have been self-published by authors via Amazon’s system.
    - wccrawford 6y ago
      Any of them that sell DRM-free ebooks would work. Of course, they have a much smaller selection than Amazon and you likely won't find the book you want. So it's not really a proper alternative. You either accept their TOS or you don't get to read the book you want digitally.
  - matheusmoreira 6y ago
    There is nowhere you can take your money that doesn't force you to accept the same abusive terms of service. They all pay lawyers to write this stuff and they all come up with the same self-serving clauses. Once you've read one of these documents, you've pretty much read them all. What they say is basically: > you have no rights > you promise not to try and exercise any right you think you have > you will not do anything the company doesn't like > the company can do anything whether you like it or not > the company is not responsible for anything ever > we make no guarantees about anything
- syshum 6y ago
  At one point in time, One-Way non-negotiable contracts where unenforceable and considered coercive. I wonder when / why that changed when we added "on the internet" an called it is "Terms of Service"
  - falcolas 6y ago
    Why is easy - because corporations love them. As for the “how”, that’s also pretty simple. Enough money applied to lawyers who argue for the corporation’s side in contract disputes, enough to set precedent.
Silhouette 6y ago
All this shouldn't suprise any of them, it's in the ToS after all. This is an extremely weak argument, IMHO. For a start, it's clearly impractical for the average person to even read all of the legal documents they theoretically agree to. It would take an absurd amount of time and have a devastating effect on our quality of life and the productivity of our society. Even that assumes the reader would be qualified to understand the legal implications of a long, often complicated document, possibly written according to the laws of another country, in the first place. This again seems extremely optimistic, given that professional lawyers spend years studying their own legal systems and are then often very well paid for sharing the expertise they have acquired. So the idea that burying something unfair or unreasonable in a ToS document that realistically almost no-one is going to read and properly understand is really just a conceit of the legal profession (and possibly not even that, since even lawyers understand the fiction that is happening here). The essence of any legal contract is an agreement, understood and entered into voluntarily by all parties involved, that exchanges things of value to the parties. Different legal systems might use slightly different words to say that, but they mean much the same thing. Hiding shady stuff in the small print of an agreement written by one side's professional lawyers and probably never even read never mind understood by the other side is far from sufficient to meet that standard for a legal contract. This is why good businesses and their lawyers go out of their way to present the key details of any agreement clearly and up-front, not to hide them on page 91. It's also why courts hearing consumer rights cases sometimes side with the consumer even if something else was stated in a ToS or similar document.

Qahlel 6y ago

You cannot avoid the TOS. They are all designed to protect the seller not the buyer. On top of that, you -as a single consumer- has no choice to select parts of the TOS. It's a unilateral-contract by definition.

f1refly 6y ago
You, as a comsumer, always have the right to not accept the ToS and take your money elsewhere. Amazon fortunately doesn't have a monopoly on the ebook market.
- leereeves 6y ago
  What store sells ebooks legally and doesn't have similar ToS?
  - f1refly 6y ago
    I usually go to the publishers or, if self published, authors website directly and buy from there. Books are distributed as epub that I can load on my ereader calibre alike.
    - sbarre 6y ago
      You keep saying this, but you leave out the fact that not that many publishers sell direct, and most popular books are not available in this manner. So yes this works _sometimes_, but not most of the time. For the majority of users who are looking for a very specific book, not just _any_ new book to read, buying it digitally means buying it from a DRM-laden marketplace.
    - falcolas 6y ago
      Amazon is also a publisher. Many books I’ve read have been self-published by authors via Amazon’s system.
  - wccrawford 6y ago
    Any of them that sell DRM-free ebooks would work. Of course, they have a much smaller selection than Amazon and you likely won't find the book you want. So it's not really a proper alternative. You either accept their TOS or you don't get to read the book you want digitally.
- matheusmoreira 6y ago
  There is nowhere you can take your money that doesn't force you to accept the same abusive terms of service. They all pay lawyers to write this stuff and they all come up with the same self-serving clauses. Once you've read one of these documents, you've pretty much read them all. What they say is basically: > you have no rights > you promise not to try and exercise any right you think you have > you will not do anything the company doesn't like > the company can do anything whether you like it or not > the company is not responsible for anything ever > we make no guarantees about anything
syshum 6y ago
At one point in time, One-Way non-negotiable contracts where unenforceable and considered coercive. I wonder when / why that changed when we added "on the internet" an called it is "Terms of Service"
- falcolas 6y ago
  Why is easy - because corporations love them. As for the “how”, that’s also pretty simple. Enough money applied to lawyers who argue for the corporation’s side in contract disputes, enough to set precedent.

Silhouette 6y ago

All this shouldn't suprise any of them, it's in the ToS after all. This is an extremely weak argument, IMHO. For a start, it's clearly impractical for the average person to even read all of the legal documents they theoretically agree to. It would take an absurd amount of time and have a devastating effect on our quality of life and the productivity of our society. Even that assumes the reader would be qualified to understand the legal implications of a long, often complicated document, possibly written according to the laws of another country, in the first place. This again seems extremely optimistic, given that professional lawyers spend years studying their own legal systems and are then often very well paid for sharing the expertise they have acquired. So the idea that burying something unfair or unreasonable in a ToS document that realistically almost no-one is going to read and properly understand is really just a conceit of the legal profession (and possibly not even that, since even lawyers understand the fiction that is happening here). The essence of any legal contract is an agreement, understood and entered into voluntarily by all parties involved, that exchanges things of value to the parties. Different legal systems might use slightly different words to say that, but they mean much the same thing. Hiding shady stuff in the small print of an agreement written by one side's professional lawyers and probably never even read never mind understood by the other side is far from sufficient to meet that standard for a legal contract. This is why good businesses and their lawyers go out of their way to present the key details of any agreement clearly and up-front, not to hide them on page 91. It's also why courts hearing consumer rights cases sometimes side with the consumer even if something else was stated in a ToS or similar document.