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This made me realise there should be a service which translates Terms of Service documents to human-readable bullet-points. Most people, myself included, are un
by revorad 15y ago
This made me realise there should be a service which translates Terms of Service documents to human-readable bullet-points. Most people, myself included, are unlikely to start reading these annoying documents, but if there was a place which highlighted important aspects (like the OP does), then we are much more likely to pay attention.
YC-funded MarketBrief is doing this for SEC documents. Is there anything that does it for ToS?
- 0x12 15y agoThat's a great idea, terms of services for users instead of for lawyers.
- muro 15y ago+ there should be the same for laws.
- fbnt 15y agoIubenda
- phpnode 15y agoi think this is an AI-complete problem. Lawyers write contracts in legalese not because they love obfuscation (although some clearly do), but because it is basically a DSL that tries to represent a set of terms in the least ambiguous way possible. To translate these documents into simpler language would require the translator (human or machine) to have a proper understanding of the content being translated, hence AI-complete. Also, the newly simplified contract would be a separate entity from the original contract, and therefore could be interpreted differently by a court. Anyone attempting to do this is opening themselves up to all sorts of horrible litigation
- revorad 15y agoThose are good points, but do you think MarketBrief is solving an AI-complete problem? There must be low-tech, semi-automated, crowdsourced solutions to this problem. The legal implications might be a problem, but maybe a community site with clear disclaimers can avoid any trouble. Even highlighting or extracting key parts of the original document would be useful.
- phpnode 15y agono, as far as I can tell MarketBrief is a different thing entirely: they're generating their content from statistics, not by comprehending and rewriting existing texts. I think the essence is this - you can probably summarize these contracts and highlight important clauses with a crowd sourced solution as you suggest, but these summaries are just an interpretation of the contract, they can't replace the real thing.
- mcherm 15y agoNevertheless, a summary of the important points in the agreements would be EXTREMELY useful to me. Unless I go to court I probably don't care whether it is the law or the law AND the arbitration that is based on the legal framework of California USA. But I do care whether or not there is a clause that says "You Can't Sue Us" in one language or another.
- arethuza 15y agoWhat about an application that provides a means of annotating ToS documents with comments explaining what parts actually mean to non-lawyers?
- Symmetry 15y agoYou can't include commentary on the ToS without them becoming part of the ToS, and thus changing the legal meaning of the ToS.