500px Terms of Service

Re:500px Terms of Service by NLips on Thursday April 12, 2012 @05:30AM (#3831664)

Good legalese IS human readable. The point of legalese is to define everything in absolutely certain terms. Where words are given unusual or overly specific meanings, these meanings should be defined in the document. Legalese can be heavy going, but should never require any knowledge that 90% of the population doesn't already posses.

Of course, having a simplified version is still nice.

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Re:500px Terms of Service by gosub on Thursday April 12, 2012 @07:00AM (#3831830)

    The point of legalese is to define everything in absolutely certain terms.

Legalese is what you get when you try to get a precise meaning from an imprecise language. It is like trying to get the type safety of Haskell in PHP, resulting in a lot of verbosity.

I think this is relevant: There is a paper+presentation from SPJ about defining a contract (financial, in this case) in Haskell. Precise and machine verifiable.

http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/um/people/simonpj/Papers...

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Re:500px Terms of Service by lifeformed on Thursday April 12, 2012 @05:47AM (#3831699)

Well, for me it's not so much about readability but about verbosity. There's always so much boilerplate that I don't know where to look.

I wish there were some default TOS templates that everyone used, and their modifications were all in a different color or something. Or maybe if everyone used common building blocks of text that were modular. Kind of like how Creative Commons lets you build a license using different key parts (attribution, non-commercial, etc).

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Re:500px Terms of Service by TazeTSchnitzel on Thursday April 12, 2012 @05:45AM (#3831697)

Yep. Legalese isn't really hard to read, it is just quite verbose.

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