this post was submitted on 03 Nov 2023
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submitted 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago) by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
 
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[โ€“] [email protected] 17 points 11 months ago (8 children)

Things like this make me think we need to change contract law to include some kind of requirement that whoever is entering into a contract have actually read and understood the contract in order for their signature on it to be meaningful. I'm not entirely sure how you'd go about setting up a system to prove this, so some compromise to practically might have to be made, but some possibilities I can see might be having the signer initial or check off each point individually, having a physical contract signing be accompanied by video of the person reading through the contract or having it explained to them, or having a neutral third party witness also sign to affirm that they witnessed this being done, or in the case of digital contracts, having each point be ticked off individually with a checkbox for a given section not made available until after a reasonable amount of time to read the section has elapsed since the previous checkbox was checked, and having a requirement that contracts made to be signed by people who are not lawyers must be written so as to be understandable by someone not versed in legal jargon.

It would be a massive headache I realize, since it would make anything where contracts are agreed to take longer and have more paperwork to document things or programming to be done for digital ones, but on the plus side, it would disincentise companies making huge terms of service contracts and end user license agreements that everybody knows virtually nobody actually reads, and make people more aware of what they're actually agreeing to.

[โ€“] [email protected] 16 points 11 months ago

Not everything should be a contract. Make the benchmark for contracts to be much higher, such as requiring two notary public or lawyer signatures for it to be binding. Casual contracts in "terms of service" should not only not be binding, but illegal with stiff penalties for trying to sneak in such terms.

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