I am, I think, slowly -- ever so slowly -- migrating towards the standard human behavior regarding the handling of Licenses for this and that. You know the drill, for downloading/installing some piece of software: you have to click a box or an "I Agree" button stating that you have read and understood the 10 pages of legalese that they have devised to confer as many benefits as possible to themselves while still allowing you to do the stuff most normal people would want to do with their software/service. My friend Henry's approach is always purely pragmatic: is anything going to happen to you if you don't read it? Is someone going to come after you? This is his approach to a lot of things, however -- especially using commercial software without paying for it. I don't personally agree with that latter philosophy, but in the case of these license agreements, it seems as if this is exactly what the vendors/providers of services expect; they WANT you to click in agreement without reading it. They don't care if you bind yourself to conditions you're not aware of; doesn't hurt them. There's no disincentive for them to keep expanding their claims until the license is bigger than the software itself. The end user, meanwhile, is left deciding whether he shold follow the letter of the law and read the whole damn license, sacrificing a lot of time and mental energy, or to recognize this for the farce that it is, click "Agree", and hope no legal ill befalls him.
I don't know what the best solution is. Software and service vendors certainly have legal needs, but it's unethical to put the user in such a position. The problem stems from a disconnect between legal and marketing, basically. The marketing just wants you to use the product; the legal dept. wants to cover their asses. Both take advantage of the fact that, in the real world, just about nobody actually reads the licenses, and everyone is clicking in agreement essentially fraudulently. But I wonder... what if we just took one simple step? What if we made a law that every User License must be preceded by a word count and a statement of reading time? For example: "The license contains 9,193 words [see Amazon.com's license Agreement], and will take most people between 10-20 minutes to read". Or, even better, if it is implicit that reading the license is mandatory to clicking on the agreement, make it explicit: "You must read the terms and conditions below. The agreement contains 150,000 words and takes most people 1-1½ hours to read."
Something like this would go a long way towards restoring the link between fantasy and reality in this department. And who knows what effects might flow from that. Perhaps vendors might start fielding more irate phone calls from people asking why their licenses are so long. Perhaps lawmakers would start taking a closer look at this absurdity. Perhaps judges might give the benefit of the doubt more often to the end user who says "no, I didn't read the license; it was too long".
And the beauty of it is that it's very straightforward. Compliance would require all of five minutes on the part of the license crafters. Yet the ripple effects could be pretty astounding.
The preceding blog post contains 552 words, and should take most people from 2-3 minutes to read.
Update 11-14-2006: It turns out I've written about this before, though not as in depth. Plus it was almost 3 years ago, and you don't remember, do you?