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Wow. That is a brilliant link. Thanks for sharing. I don't know why terms can't be written that simply in the first place.
by RuffleGordon 5y ago
Wow. That is a brilliant link. Thanks for sharing.
I don't know why terms can't be written that simply in the first place.
- paxys 5y agoTwo reasons: 1. Legal contracts are supposed to be as detailed as possible so there's as little room for disagreement as possible when taken to court. 2. It's better for companies if users don't take the time to read and understand their terms, and beyond a certain length and complexity they will just scroll through and click yes.
- skrebbel 5y ago3. Lawyers are incentivized to write incompehensibly because it helps keep them in business. 4. It's easier to write incompehensible legal text than simple English that a layman can follow, and customers seldomly call lawyers out on it because they've been trained to accept this as the status quo (also see 3).
- icegreentea2 5y agoThe "good" answer for why terms of use and contracts are written more complexly is because they encode more complex information, that is less subject to varying interpretations. Though certainly there is a 'pattern' to these that I think lawyers just fall back into that can be less understandable than needed. If nothing else, many contracts are written in a somewhat weird frame, where one party is referred to in third person, and the other in second person. And often phrasing is so that the second person needs to recognize a claim of the third person ("you acknowledge etc etc"). In many ways, contracts are like the ultimate reversal of YAGNI. Imagine deploying code that you literally could not fix after release, and you knew that nearly all deviations from intended behavior would just kick you in the butt. Your code (and general product function) would probably get a bit weird too.