| Educational settings are one of the worst places where insidious terms crop up. You often simply don't have a choice. I'm a volunteer firefighter and was registered by my department to take a course with a government-run institution to upgrade my certification. A while back that institution began using Blackboard - a Netherlands company - for all learning materials, whose ToS [1] includes a clause where I must agree to defend and indemnify Blackboard from and against any and all claims, damages, obligations, losses, liabilities, costs or debt, and expenses (including but not limited to attorney's fees) arising from my use of and access to their product, as well as any other party's access and use of the product with my username or password (which I contemplate could occur if Blackboard or the institution were to suffer a data breach). To read the textbook (only available online) there was a similar ToS from yet another third party. You can't access any of the material without explicitly agreeing to both contracts. I was uncomfortable with the clause. For one, I didn't understand why my interaction with my local government institution required me to indemnify two foreign companies with whom I have zero relation (and didn't want any).
Before "cloud services", the institution would have contracted with the vendors themselves to buy the platform, then presented their own contract to me (which is the right way to do this, and which I'd be fine with). I deferred accepting, and reached out to the institution to find out if there was some alternative way to obtain the materials (e.g. in hardcopy). I spent months trying to find alternative arrangements, but the bottom line was nobody cared. I showed it to a commercial lawyer in the department who agreed the clause is nonsensical and he expressed some choice words for the institution foisting this upon its students. I give of my own time and volition do firefighting and rescue (and love doing so!). Nobody was paying me to take this course. In the end I wound up hitting the Accept button, with a deep feeling of having effectively been bullied into it. Compared to some of the other ToS's I've seen out there this one was comparatively mild. I can only imagine how parents must feel when such garbage finds its way into their kids' learning environments. [1] https://help.blackboard.com/Terms_of_Use and https://tosdr.org/en/service/2230 |