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Judges and juries can see through blatant abuses and rule that the contract did not cover that use. I've seen this observation mentioned a few times on HN and
by jamesbritt 14y ago
Judges and juries can see through blatant abuses and rule that the contract did not cover that use.
I've seen this observation mentioned a few times on HN and it seems quite right. The letter of the law may say this or that, but ultimately it comes down to some form of the giggle test. You have to imagine a judge saying, "You didn't really think that's what the law|contract meant, did you?"
For example, people trying to avoid penalties for unauthorized distribution of copyrighted material by claiming they own the copyright on certain large integers or are merely passing _numbers_ around, not movies or songs.
With the boilerplate TOS there may be all sorts of things that one could imagine are allowed but I'm pretty sure Instagram's (i.e. Facebook's) lawyers thought that the original phrasing would not be sufficient to clearly allow them to do what they wanted to do, so it was changed.