> always read the fine print, no matter how long it may be.
I think it’s time we stop doling out this advice and acknowledge that it’s entirely unrealistic. I’m a lawyer. I read the fine print a lot. Sometimes just for fun. But even I don’t “always” read it. Usually I don’t even read it so much as I give it a skim. If I read the fine print each and every time I came across it during the day I would literally do nothing else. Not even sleep.
And that’s to say nothing of the average person’s hope of actually understanding what the fine print even means!
But even for someone very well-suited (a retired lawyer, for example, with all the time in the world) the suggestion to always read the fine print is absurd.
These are contracts of adhesion. As consumers we usually don’t have any leverage to change the terms or even much of a choice to take our business elsewhere. It makes far more sense to regulate consumer contracts and force businesses not to screw people over than it does to ask millions of people to waste hours of their lives reading pages and pages of legalese they don’t understand and couldn’t change even if they did.
I agree with you, but i also think as i wrote before in another reply, another issue i would like to submit to you as a lawyer with experience in law, reading the TOS to me seems something to make you feel relatively good on the moment but most of it retain the right to change those after you've bought something, what do you think about that?
It's been a year since i bought anything, so i solved it like that, the issue is not even the fine print anymore is that anything retains the right to change the terms and conditions without explanation or warning, in Italy we have a law that if a company change the terms and conditions it has to communicate it to you and has to give you 30 days in order to stop the contract without any penalty, it works for services and software but we don't have anything to protect people from hardware to force company to buy back devices in case of unilateral TOS changes, so it sucks a bit, on the other hand in the rest of EU there isn't even the protection for software
I think it’s time we stop doling out this advice and acknowledge that it’s entirely unrealistic. I’m a lawyer. I read the fine print a lot. Sometimes just for fun. But even I don’t “always” read it. Usually I don’t even read it so much as I give it a skim. If I read the fine print each and every time I came across it during the day I would literally do nothing else. Not even sleep.
And that’s to say nothing of the average person’s hope of actually understanding what the fine print even means!
But even for someone very well-suited (a retired lawyer, for example, with all the time in the world) the suggestion to always read the fine print is absurd.
These are contracts of adhesion. As consumers we usually don’t have any leverage to change the terms or even much of a choice to take our business elsewhere. It makes far more sense to regulate consumer contracts and force businesses not to screw people over than it does to ask millions of people to waste hours of their lives reading pages and pages of legalese they don’t understand and couldn’t change even if they did.