eSignature Legality for End User License Agreement

How to eSign a document: e-signature legality for End User License Agreement

we've all done it we log on to a new website and come upon the terms of service agreement and instead of reading it we just click agree but guess who has time to read all that stuff even if it is a legally binding contract the answer is effectively no one since one study found it would take the average person about 250 hours 30 full working days every year to read them all Seth Stevenson is a senior writer for slate and recently wrote about the crazy world of end user agreements Seth good morning thanks for having me on what ultimately is the purpose of these agreements really it's to protect the companies if it was good for you they would put it in huge fonts on the front of these pages but instead they hide it in tiny in tiny fine print you know somewhere you have to click three times to find it so it's to protect them it's to it's to cover them up and make sure that you can't sue them and make sure that they are not exposed to any legal liabilities what I found Most Fascinating though is that you don't even have to necessarily click if you are scrolling through someone's website you might have by default accepted the terms and agreement exactly if you if it says click to agree and you click for sure you have agreed ing to the courts but even sometimes if you're surfing around and just looking at a page you may be bound by the terms of that page just by being on it the courts have often found that you're you're still beholden to what they've put on their terms and conditions P I don't know anybody who actually reads this stuff so what's actually in there it depends it can it can be some crazy stuff there was an incar uh navigation service that said they could basically spy on anything that happened in your car and report your GPS information to law authorities where you are at any given time there was one company that put a clause in saying they could show up at your house at any time in the middle of the night and and audit was the term they used you know what your possessions basically some of these things are absolutely insane and I think the people who craft them often don't even know what they're putting in there they throw in everything including the kitchen sink just to make sure they're covered in any eventuality are they really legally binding though has anyone actually taken someone to court and said I didn't mean to agree to that well that's the problem one of the things that's in these Agreements are these Clauses designed to prevent you from suing the company so they basically uh prevent you from doing any sort of class action suit where you take all the consumers who who are subject to these agreements and get together and sue the company basically they try to make that impossible to do but do they since they're shaving off some of their costs in terms of protecting themselves on the front end do we end up getting anything that costs less well sure I mean there are all sorts of services that you probably use like Facebook or Google Google Maps things like these are free services that a lot of people enjoy and if companies had more legal liability and had to pay more in order to protect themselves from those legal liabilities the services might not be free so you know there is an argument to be made that you would prefer to have a service with uh you'd prefer to have a website with terrible terms of service um but it's a great service that you enjoy using and it's free as opposed to just a terrible product that you don't even want to use but it's got terrific terms of service that doesn't really help you out anyway some of these some of these Agreements are ridiculously long the Apple iTunes contract for example is 55 Pages it's like 30 Fe when you splice it together I mean do they really expect you to read these things and will the courts actually uphold them nobody reads these things even the people I talk to who craft these agreements the lawyers who make them they don't read them if you did read them you wouldn't understand them because they're in legal Le that the average person can't make heads or tails of but they're legally binding they're still legally binding we've gotten ourselves in a crazy situation and no one I talked to could really see a way out of it we have to ask you about the one guy who actually did read one of these and it had a reward tucked inside the end user agreement yeah so one of these software companies hid a little Clause deep in its terms of service agreement that said the first person who sees this just write to us and we're give you we're going to give you I think it was $1,000 and it took months and thousands of people read you know clicking through and agreeing to the agreement before anyone pointed it out which just goes to show that nobody's looking at these things make us think twice before we click yes Seth Stevenson thank you so much thank you