Internet terms & conditions, licence agreements

P.A._Ranoia

[FONT=arial, helvetica, sans-serif]Internet terms & conditions, licence agreements

When installing software or making purchases on line it is usually not possible to proceed without ticking box to accept terms and conditions or licence agreement. Presumably the financial and legal consequences of falling foul of t&c could be serious. Whilst disputes may be rare, originators would not go to the trouble and expense of paying lawyers to create them otherwise.

But in reality:
- Few will even read the document let alone understand all implications. [Apparently for one day Gamestation inserted an experimental clause giving them rights to customers' immortal souls. Few noticed.]
- Even if the Internet user believes he understood such long and complicated documents he may not have.

- Given the number of such documents encountered, expecting Internet users to read t&c is wildly impractical.

Apparently the Unfair Terms in Consumer Contracts Regulations 1999 require that terms are presented in plain and intelligible language. What can be done to compel originators to produce short and intelligible terms and conditions or licenses?

Alternatively could they be forced to trade under an umbrella of presumed terms? This is the way in which most other business is facilitated, e.g. one does not sign a lengthy agreement when one buys a book from a bookshop.



















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Buzby

I share your sentiment, but the reality is very different. Business have been getting away with (virtual) murder, by their relentless pursuit of cutting out the middleman (the consumer) and connecting directly to the financial source - the customer's bank.

If you said to someone just 10 years ago that would be possible for anyone to remove money from your bank account simply by quoting the sort code and account number, you would have been laughed at - but they are not laughing now. There is no requirement for any explicit agreement, just one of the parties had to assert permission has been given. The banks facilitated this by drawing up T&Cs that automatically changed the ground rules, and there was no opt-out available, you either agreed (by not doing anything) or you closed your account and moved elsewhere, to a different bank that was doing exactly the same thing.

With this success of this manipulation, it didn't take long for non-financial commercial entities to pck up on this way of working, and we now get to the stage where imposed terms are deemed agreed to by the customer UNLESS he/she has done something to repoudiate it, but this usually means they have not to use the product or service they have paid for.

This way of working isn't particularly new, it is just seeping into more and more commercial interactions that the public become involved in, where previously it was only in business-to-business transactions.

Until the courts cease to accept that this course of action is unreasonable, the thin end of the wedge is contining to be rammed in, and evidence of this is easy to see - so-called 'rolling' contracts that mean you always have a renewable minimum term to stop you leaving (except on the anniversary), penalising those who refuse to allow direct debits... the list is endless.

OFCOM are doing something about the first issue, but the OFT feels absolutely nothing is wrong with the second - so we are stuck with it.