3 ms·

Fine print or not, most people (myself included) rarely if ever read the "fine print". If you did read the fine print, and you were of a problem-solving (pessi

• nerdponx 5y ago
  I come from a family of lawyers, and I do usually at least skim the fine print. But it's pretty much all the same and there's nothing I can do about it unless I radically detach myself from society in a way that I would prefer not to do. Binding arbitration clauses and extremely vague/weaselly privacy policies are the most common. Refund policies that are dependent on information that is not available to you until after you make the purchase (such as the type of your plane ticket booked through an online agency). Et alia. It's absolutely hilarious in the "ha ha isn't the world horrible" sense that anyone in a position of power would base legal decisions on the premise that consumers "voluntarily" enter into such agreements. It is voluntary only in the sense that the alternative is cultural/social deprivation and self-imposed exile from society. Participants in society are expected to be willing to connect to the Internet, board an airplane, etc. As it stands, entering into such an agreement is almost certainly done under duress and coercion. Any argument that consumers should "vote with their dollar" is meaningless, because there are essentially no alternatives. To argue otherwise is to blatantly disregard the facts, to the point where it can only be done out of malice. Court justices are too intelligent and too well-educated for this to be considered a matter of ignorance. In my opinion, the fact that the legal stuff tends to be written in fine print is almost irrelevant. People don't ignore it because it's small. If people had a real choice, they would read it anyway. The problem fundamentally is that people do not have any real choice. People don't read such agreements because they feel powerless, not because they are lazy.
  • ryandrake 5y ago
    Since you have above-average exposure to the law due to your family being lawyers, maybe you have insight into this question I've always wondered: Why aren't these Terms of Service and EULAs more routinely voided due to them being unconscionable and adhesive? These seem to tick all the boxes: One-sided, no meaningful choice, no meeting of the minds, significant differences in bargaining power between the parties, no ability to negotiate, take-it-or-leave-it terms. I've never seen a Terms of Service or EULA that could be negotiated. Isn't that a fundamental attribute of a "voluntary" contract?
    • nerdponx 5y ago
      My impression is that courts generally do rule that these agreements are voluntary, because you can always just not do the thing with the shitty agreements attached to it, ergo they are not unconscionable nor adhesive. Hence my rant above; in TFA, Supreme Court explicitly ruled that the terms were voluntary. Otherwise stuff like binding arbitration would be effectively illegal. I can ask one of the lawyers if there are exceptions to this, that I'm not aware of. What I do know is that if some specific element of the agreement is unenforceable, usually the rest of the agreement remains unaffected and in-force. As for why, it's easy to blame the "judicial-industrial" complex and "judicial capture". I don't see another plausible explanation, but I am also not an expert. There might be arcane legal reasons for why things the way they are, beyond the "judges generally care more about businesses than people" hypothesis.