A Stitch in Haste

Xrlq of damnum absque injuria, applies some WD-40 to PayPal's End User License Agreement ("EULA"), which is what lawyers call an adhesion contract:

Typically, the worst contracts around are so-called adhesion contracts, the ones where someone hands you a great big document and says "sign here," with no opportunity to review or negotiate the terms. EULAs tend to be very bad in this respect, although some are a lot worse than others.

Unfortunately the post isn't abridged, but you can just scroll up, down and all around looking for Xrlq's lines through the words strikethroughs and the bolded additions. Heh.

Of course, as a greedy capitalist bastard big fan of economic analysis of the law, in reality I utterly disagree with Xrlq's thesis: adhesion contracts are awesome. Large businesses of course cannot negotiate every aspect of every contract with every customer every single time. Conformity in contracts means efficiency; efficiency means lower costs; lower costs mean lower prices. Hooray!

And of course Xrlq engages in a bit of sleight-of-hand by bundling "no opportunity to review" with "no opportunity to negotiate." Not only are two totally unrelated, but the first is blatantly false, especially in the context of online EULAs or Terms of Service ("TOS"). The fact that you, or I, or Xrlq are too lazy to sit and read PayPal's entire EULA is not the same as saying we have "no opportunity" to do so.

Adhesion contracts are a necessary and desirable lubricant that keep the gears of modern capitalism, and especially modern Internet-based capitalism, turning smoothly.

For Discussion: Check my premises -- are we really being "lazy" when we skip over EULAs and TOS, or are we being rationally (i.e., efficiently) apathetic about them?