Terms & conditions are the most ridiculous thing. Every now and again my iPhone asks me to accept a new set of T&C's before i download a free app - which in itself seems ludicrous. I happened to notice the last time that I was viewing page 1 of 59. 59 pages of legal garbage. Imagine how long the team of people (who charge their time by the minute on chess clocks) took to draw this up and get it approved. I wonder how many people actually reads even the first line. I wonder how many read past the first page.
I really don't know much about legal issues, but in my limited experience legal judgements seem to usually come down to what is 'reasonable'. I'm sure there have been cases where people have technically been in breach of the T&C's, but the legal verdict was sympathetic to the fact that people could never reasonably be expected to have read all the small-print anyway. If that is the case, then its pretty ridiculous that everyone has to go through this rigmarole of supposedly legally accepting a contract which they've got no knowledge or understanding of. Shouldn't it be a legal requirement that you must have read and understood everything in order for it to be legally binding? I seem to remember on the PS3 they make an attempt to ensure that happens - you have to scroll to the bottom of the text before you can click 'Accept', having not read a word of it of course.
Everyone does it, its just the way it is. The exceptions are when we're buying a house or signing an employment contract, but in those cases the implications are much closer to 'home' and we usually have an expert helping us understand the salient points. For the rest of the legal stuff we accept every day, we just hope it never comes back to bite us - but it obviously does sometimes. Does anyone know what my legal rights are if Flickr decides it can't afford to keep all my photos any more? No doubt their T&Cs completely absolve them from any legal recourse if things go pear-shaped. Anyway, that's not a great example, and Flickr is probably one of the best example of a service that respects copyright issues for ordinary people through Creative Commons etc.
Anyway, with the whole T&C's thing in general, there must be a better way - at least of informing people a little bit better. If you are going to read an article, its nice to scan an abstract first. I'm sure its not just a lack of loving attention that makes T&C's so ugly and uninviting - it's not in the interests of the legal dudes to make it easier to understand, because more people would have a 'WTF?!' moment and decide not to accept them! But if there was a kind of 'Key points' or summary approach it would be much nicer from a brand > customer relationship point of view. Why not start with something like 'You own all the content, but if it gets deleted by accident you can't sue us, sorry.', followed by a 'Read more about content ownership' link.
From a (UX) design point of view, T&C's is not something that designers think a lot about. It's probably last on the list, and is tedious and very uninteresting. But, it is pretty important and has a large ethical aspect to it. If people understood more clearly what they were accepting, they might challenge them more - a good thing!
