Yes, contract law is as old as the Garden of Eden but there can also be too much of a good thing. The reality is that each of us enter into contracts all the time that we don’t read. And even if you read it the first time, you’ll get periodic updates to terms and conditions in your inbox. If everyone had to read the terms and conditions each time, society would grind to a halt.
Given that fact, the only reasonable way forward in my view is that contracts do not hide what should be plainly known to other parties in the contract.
> Given that fact, the only reasonable way forward in my view is that contracts do not hide what should be plainly known to other parties in the contract.
Life would be nicer if everyone wrote with clarity, but given that they don’t, we have a special class of people who went through three years of house training to interpret long-ass documents written to disambiguate any possible ambiguities in advance to a standard the parties can agree to; because if you don’t spell everything out exactly, then you might lose if you have to go to court.
The contracts themselves do have to be within the bounds of what’s legal. So for example, you can’t legally sell yourself into slavery because that would come right up against the law and be an illegal contract. Similarly, NDAs don’t pass muster in California because they’re statutorily limited.
So given that you’re probably not going to get rounded up and made into a Human CentiPad for agreeing to the Apple Music TOS or give up your firstborn to use Gmail, I guess you have to prioritize don’t you? When the stakes are “I’ll lose access to this service”, you better figure out what can cause you to lose it if you value the service. A good place to start is to know what is mission critical, like a web host for your podcast if your business is podcasting and an invoice tracker if you do a lot of billing.
So if you’re doing business and you didn’t review the service agreement ahead of time, that is on you. I work in a small business right now with a very small number of people: we review our service agreements ahead of time before we sign them, and even after we’ve reviewed them we have a lawyer on retainer we run them by even if we’re just changing vendors or adding a new vendor because sometimes vendors try to slip things in. That’s what it’s like to do business. There’s a lot of paperwork too, even if the paperwork is virtual and if you take shortcuts, it might work out for you, but you’re exposing yourself to issues down the road if you don’t do your due diligence.
Life’s tough in the aluminum siding business. I don’t know what else to tell you.
Given that fact, the only reasonable way forward in my view is that contracts do not hide what should be plainly known to other parties in the contract.