Friday, April 16, 2010

Always read the fine print.

How many of you click "I Agree" on software licensing agreements and suchlike without ever reading the fine print?

Do you know who owns your soul right now? Are you sure?
"By placing an order via this Web site on the first day of the fourth month of the year 2010 Anno Domini, you agree to grant Us a non transferable option to claim, for now and for ever more, your immortal soul. Should We wish to exercise this option, you agree to surrender your immortal soul, and any claim you may have on it, within 5 (five) working days of receiving written notification from gamesation.co.uk or one of its duly authorised minions."
Thing is, if people had actually read through the form, they could have clicked a link to opt out of the "soul clause" and which would have given them a coupon worth £5, to boot. Eighty-eight percent never read that far, apparently, and are now soulless minions of GameStation.co.uk.

16 comments:

  1. "first day of the fourth month." Hmmmmm. Would that be April 1?

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  2. What better day to slip that clause into your standard boilerplate? :D

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  3. Five miserable pounds? They couldn't do better than that -- with souls in the balance? (haha)

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  4. Now, now; we are talkin' British souls here. There's a discount, just as there is for all scratched and dented merchandise.

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  5. They'd be too late to catch mine. World of Warcraft already has it.

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  6. I found out about this problem back when I put funny things in search warrants.

    And no one noticed them.

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  7. Mweh. They weren't using 'em anyway.

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  8. "I found out about this problem back when I put funny things in search warrants.

    And no one noticed them.
    "

    I don't know whether to laugh heartily or nervously at that.

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  9. I grew up with an attorney for a mother. I always read the fine print, and have declined some software because of the little "oh by the way, that privacy thing? Forget it - we own you once you install this software" clause in some of it. Bleh!

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  10. "Not without my handbag!"
    One of my favorites! "My auntie is a zombie from hell!"
    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jAyQVRGuyKU

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  11. Point of order. Those minons are not soulless until GameStation.co.uk collects on the agreement.

    Pedantically yours,

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  12. If you read all those "agreements" you'd never accomplish anything else. Your whole life would be spent reading legalese, complete with cross references, cross cross references, and cross cross cross references, ad infinitum. This is the definition of hell, so you're in hell either way you look at it. -- Lyle

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  13. Sounds a bit like DLR's insistence on no brown M&Ms, just to see if the contracts are in fact being read in detail.

    Jim

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  14. Meh. All Britons are issued a cheap, soul-like replacement shortly after birth, provided by National Health. If you are knighted or enter the peerage, you can obtain a better one. In palmier days, even being Mentioned In Dispatches would get an upgrad to a soul determined -- by exacting measurement -- to be every bit as good as that possessed by a modern Frenchman. Sadly, the Empire has declined since.

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  15. Was GameStation secretly collecting souls for "gamesation?"

    Which editor missed that?

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