Signed, but not read

More and more these days I find that I am required to give up rights in order to access goods, services, and opportunities.

Companies with teams of legal professionals create ridiculously long sets of terms and conditions that I am forced to agree with in order to participate in today’s society.

Sure, I have choices: I can opt not to participate; or I can carefully review every letter of the legalese while doing my best to understand the intricacies of the jargon that I was not trained for years to understand; I can even pay a lawyer to read through everything and break it down into layman terms that help me to understand.

Instead, I do what all of us do. I simply realize that I have to sign the document, check the box, or click on the “agree” button in order to participate and go on my merry way.

Does anyone actually read what rights we are waiving by agreeing to things that we simply have to agree to in order to participate in society?

Come to think of it, to even write this post I have had to agree to a whole gamut of separate Terms and Conditions:

- OSX has a set (so that I can install iTunes)
- iTunes has a set (so that I can activate my iPhone and download the WordPress app)
- iOS4.1 has a set (so that the phone is updated to function as intended)
- Rogers Internet has a set (to download and update iTunes as well as register my hardware)
- Rogers Wireless has a different set (so that I can post from my phone)
- GoDaddy.com has a set for owning the URL
- I had to agree to a different set from GoDaddy for hosting of this site
- And, I think finally, I had to agree to a set in order to use WordPress

That’s at least 8 sets of Terms and Conditions that I was forced to agree to simply to write a single blog post.

Now I’m no lawyer and, despite being a relatively intelligent man, I am not trained well enough to be able to identify what every clause in every agreement actually means. I’m put in a position whereby the sheer volume and technical jargon of most of these agreements make reading and comprehending the information unreasonable.

Do you realize that just to use the freely available iTunes, which I do, I had to agree to a 26,000 word agreement? That doesn’t sound reasonable to me. In fact, I think that it sounds down right unfair. And I’m the very definition of an Apple fanboy.

I’ve decided to do something about it. I’m going to be the first person to stand up and change the definition of a convention that has become commonplace. I am changing the definition of my signature.

From this point, my signature, when dealing with any entity beyond an individual, no longer constitutes an agreement of any kind. My signature means “Signed, under duress, without reading or comprehending”. And this counts for every check box that I have to check or “Agree” button that i have to click on to participate in society, whether it’s something that I pay for or something that is offered for free.

Hey world, this is your notice … With the billions of words on the Internet and the unreasonable nature of this forced agreement I bet this seems unfair.

How do you think I feel?

N