[goodrubyist]

Agreeing to terms and contracts without reading or at least skimming them is not responsible adult behavior and should not be used as a model for legislation, no matter how many people do it. I agree that we do have a culture where private law is not taken very seriously, and that's very unfortunate.

People do not have a right (morally speaking, not legally) to access or use a service (or a website) etc without having to read/agree to the terms (applies to analog and digital).

[Maxion]

Try to get anything done then, there's so many places these days where you have to approve 300 page legal documents to e.g. record day care times, pick up packages and so forth. There is literally not enough time in the day. The option for me would be to not put my kid in daycare (I lose the spot if I don't put in the daycare times, and the only way to do that is a 3rd party service) and not pick up packages (have to agree to the EULA to get the app that I need to unlock the pickup locker) and dozens of other places.

We really need to stop companies from putting up these insanely complicated legal texts to use basic services when they could all be behind standard contracts.

[goodrubyist]

They're usually not that complicated. And most of them say usually almost the same things with some edits thrown here and there. E.g. compare the disclaimer of warranty/liability sections of two different EULAs. E.g. this kind of text in Apple macOS Tahoe EULA is found almost everywhere:

TO THE MAXIMUM EXTENT PERMITTED BY APPLICABLE LAW, THE APPLE SOFTWARE AND SERVICES ARE PROVIDED “AS IS” AND “AS AVAILABLE”

https://www.apple.com/legal/sla/docs/macOSTahoe.pdf

The same point applies to most of the text. But yes, some text is specific to the service. E.g. the same doc above says in bold:

"By using the Content Caching Features of the Apple Software, you agree that Apple may download and cache such Apple Eligible Content on your Caching Enabled Mac."

I'd say that's something worth knowing if you use that OS.

[swat535]

Terms of services and contracts are written for lawyers and not the average people.

If your terms require people to get a law degree and take a week to parse the 400 page document, then I would argue that it's a tactic to get people to sign up for the service without fully understanding it.

We need legislation that forces companies to communicate the terms in a way that an average person can comprehend.

[goodrubyist]

I'm an average person and I read them all the time. It's not usually 400 pages long. More like 3-4 pages. If a person genuinely can't understand, they should not use the service. That's not sarcasm, I, myself, do not like to sign contracts I cannot understand -- but that's rare when you can look up stuff.

[inigyou]

Terms of service aren't even legally binding!

[goodrubyist]

Wikipedia and a few other sites I saw say otherwise for the US. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terms_of_service Wouldn't make much sense otherwise.

[sumeno]

How much of https://www.ycombinator.com/legal/ have you actually read?

[goodrubyist]

All of it, if it was presented for me to accept when signing up for this account. Don't remember explicitly. As I said to others, most of it is boilerplate, so you just learn to skim and see the stuff that's really different.