Tuesday, October 02, 2007
Will bloggers take all the fun out of contracts of adhesion?
Glenn Reynolds links to some blogger outrage over a term buried in the form AT&T service agreement -- an anti-disparagement clause, of all things. If you rag on AT&T it can, in theory, terminate your account.
This reminded me of two items of historical interest.
First of all, had this contract been around back when AT&T had a monopoly on POTS*, Alan Sherman clearly would have been in violation of it.
Also, it made me think of an anecdote I heard around twenty years ago. One of the major credit card issuers wanted to see whether anybody actually read the terms of the credit agreements that come enclosed with a new credit card. The bank buried a sentence deep in a sample of contracts that said, more or less, "If you've read this far, call us and we will send you $25." Supposedly, the bank put that message in something like a thousand credit card agreements and did not receive a single call requesting the money, a result that would not have surprised anyone who has clicked on an online software license without reading it.
The linked post makes me wonder, though, whether bloggers will drive blowback against businesses that put abusive provisions into essentially non-negotiable contracts of adhesion. Back in the day nobody would hear of it even if an occasional abnormally curious customer -- such as me -- read one of these agreements. Nowadays, though, it only takes one crank with a blog and a lucky link from Glenn Reynolds to turn the boilerplate into a public relations problem. Since the "cranks" and "bloggers" categories increasingly overlap, we will probably see many more episodes like this.
It will take all the fun out of writing sneaky contracts of adhesion.
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*Plain Old Telephone Service
2 Comments:
By 
Georg Felis, at
Wed Oct 03, 09:33:00 AM:
Just goes to show the old saying. "Where's there's a will, there's a lawyer" :)
By 
, at
Wed Oct 03, 11:08:00 AM:
I would like to see a broad comparison of "Privacy Policies" of banks, insurance companies, credit card issuers, etc.
From my study of most of these it could be summed up by saying "You have no privacy!".
