All this shouldn't suprise any of them, it's in the ToS after all.
This is an extremely weak argument, IMHO.
For a start, it's clearly impractical for the average person to even read all of the legal documents they theoretically agree to. It would take an absurd amount of time and have a devastating effect on our quality of life and the productivity of our society.
Even that assumes the reader would be qualified to understand the legal implications of a long, often complicated document, possibly written according to the laws of another country, in the first place. This again seems extremely optimistic, given that professional lawyers spend years studying their own legal systems and are then often very well paid for sharing the expertise they have acquired.
So the idea that burying something unfair or unreasonable in a ToS document that realistically almost no-one is going to read and properly understand is really just a conceit of the legal profession (and possibly not even that, since even lawyers understand the fiction that is happening here).
The essence of any legal contract is an agreement, understood and entered into voluntarily by all parties involved, that exchanges things of value to the parties. Different legal systems might use slightly different words to say that, but they mean much the same thing. Hiding shady stuff in the small print of an agreement written by one side's professional lawyers and probably never even read never mind understood by the other side is far from sufficient to meet that standard for a legal contract.
This is why good businesses and their lawyers go out of their way to present the key details of any agreement clearly and up-front, not to hide them on page 91. It's also why courts hearing consumer rights cases sometimes side with the consumer even if something else was stated in a ToS or similar document.
This is an extremely weak argument, IMHO.
For a start, it's clearly impractical for the average person to even read all of the legal documents they theoretically agree to. It would take an absurd amount of time and have a devastating effect on our quality of life and the productivity of our society.
Even that assumes the reader would be qualified to understand the legal implications of a long, often complicated document, possibly written according to the laws of another country, in the first place. This again seems extremely optimistic, given that professional lawyers spend years studying their own legal systems and are then often very well paid for sharing the expertise they have acquired.
So the idea that burying something unfair or unreasonable in a ToS document that realistically almost no-one is going to read and properly understand is really just a conceit of the legal profession (and possibly not even that, since even lawyers understand the fiction that is happening here).
The essence of any legal contract is an agreement, understood and entered into voluntarily by all parties involved, that exchanges things of value to the parties. Different legal systems might use slightly different words to say that, but they mean much the same thing. Hiding shady stuff in the small print of an agreement written by one side's professional lawyers and probably never even read never mind understood by the other side is far from sufficient to meet that standard for a legal contract.
This is why good businesses and their lawyers go out of their way to present the key details of any agreement clearly and up-front, not to hide them on page 91. It's also why courts hearing consumer rights cases sometimes side with the consumer even if something else was stated in a ToS or similar document.