@rysiek As it turns out, lawyers will write whatever they are incentivized to write. If the TOS is unclear or too long, either the lawyers aren't very good or (more likely) the client has conflicting, inflexible, and/or and incoherent goals and probably isn't very smart.
I wouldn't be sure. The standard legal theory is that intent of the parties when entering the contract trumps its letter (e.g. if the letter of the contract contains a typo that changes its meaning, and it can be shown that both parties intended to enter a contract without that typo, the contract without the typo can be enforced). The blogpost can be very strong evidence of intent.
That said, arguing that in front of a court will be risky and costly, regardless of whether it's actually correct.
@robryk blogpost can be helpful, sure, but as a user of a service, how the fsck am I to know that there's a blogpost that proves my point?
In other words, this kind of thing can be used to purposefully obscure stuff. You write X in your ToS, you get pushback, you "clarify" it in a blogpost that you send to the critics, but regular users still only read the ToS and are none the wiser.
That sounds like an undesirable situation for the company though: regular users see only the terms that can be understood to be worse than the terms they could actually argue in court they are getting. So, the company gets loss of business due to user-unfriendly terms and the user-unfriendliness is probably unenforceable. (IOW, isn't this unforced self-generated negative PR?)
But what does falling for it consist of? The company can choose to act according to worse terms or not; they can't divine whether a given user has fallen for that and act differently in that case.
(I'm thinking of a difference in terms that allows the company to e.g. use user's data for something; perhaps I'm not seeing the kind of difference you meant?)
@robryk I never said it's a good strategy. But I can totally see it as a strategy devised by some idiot CEO to try to "maximize shareholder value."
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When we get criticized for this ToS change, we'll point people to this blogpost and claim its fixed.
Meanwhile, for most people, we'll just continue to use the exact language in the ToS, training them AIs on their data. They will never find that blogpost anyway!
We can't lose!
"""
It's bullshit, but I can totally see that kind of conversation
@rysiek had this myself with a company, emailed me about a promo, didn't even point out that the terms were in the blogpost then said i didnt qualify because wait for it, i didnt read the blogpost that they never said the terms were in, all they said is read more on the blog. not, the full terms are on the blog.
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