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danlitttoday at 11:02 AM2 repliesview on HN

> Why should a government prohibit private parties from agreeing to anything other than those 3 things?

> I'm not saying any term should be enforceable. Contract law has a long history against that. I just wonder how and where you draw the line and what existing law is insufficient.

This is not a magic list of 3 things that I think is complete.

I think there is a compromise between allowing companies to add arbitrary terms, including some which are enforceable but (by my feeling) unreasonable, and excluding unreasonable terms completely with a blanket ban, which no doubt would result in some companies being unable to add reasonable terms that are not in the list.

I think if we picked the 3 terms I outlined in my comment, the result would be a more pleasant situation than the one we have.

You could just say I disagree about what is an enforceable term. The point of the analogy is to show how ridiculous I find the current judicial reasoning, which is something along the lines of "if you don't like the term, you don't have to use the service, so it doesn't really matter how restrictive the terms are". I really think this is how particularly US judges think about this sort of thing, and I think it does a lot of harm to society. People find it obviously unreasonable for McDonalds to say how you can eat your burger, or for a book store to say what you can do with the information in your book, but when a service tells you how you can use the data you get from them, it's fair game. It's ethically inconsistent.


Replies

throwaway173738today at 1:28 PM

Judges which apply that sort of reasoning really ought to think about how it applies to a hospital visit in which they were incapacitated and received a bunch of treatment. Would it be legally appropriate to slip a term about binding arbitration, or a hold harmless, or maybe a release allowing photos of their visit to be used for advertising?

stinkbeetletoday at 3:11 PM

> This is not a magic list of 3 things that I think is complete.

Okay, but you do think it should be an extremely limited scope of things along those lines that parties may form contractual agreements around. It's just such a radical idea that I was hoping to hear some interesting reasoning behind it. If it's just things seem like they might be more pleasant if we did that, then sure thing that's great, certainly would be nice if things were more pleasant we can agree on that.