Microsoft updates their Terms of Service to an easily readable Q&A format

http://windows.microsoft.com/en-US/windows-live/microsoft-services-agreement

by spauka • 14 years ago

106 24 14 years ago

windows.microsoft.com

It's still long enough that it needs a table of contents with links, as well as long enough that the only people reading it are people looking for legal recourse.

nolok• 14 years ago

I'm not sure why you expected any different, better formatting doesn't make a boring content any less boring; if you don't enjoy legalese pretty colors and bold sections aren't going to change that.

Still, a lot better than a lot of other TOS out there that you can't properly read even if you want to because ALL CAPS EVERYWHERE.

pydave• 14 years ago

They could have gone with the CC approach:

For humans: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/

For lawyers: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/legalcode

Granted, Microsoft's lawyers probably wouldn't approve (because people might argue that they're agreeing to the simplified terms that have wriggle room and not the iron-clad legalese).

htp• 14 years ago

Yes, but instead of being a giant, monolithic wall of pain, it's now broken down into much less daunting chunks of text.

I caught myself actively reading the agreement like it was a blog post. The questions helped frame what I was about to read, and made the answers feel a lot more accessible.

(It also helps that the answers seem like they were written for normal people to understand. They're a little wordy, but in a thorough-yet-not-quite-legalese-y kind of way.)

selectout• 14 years ago

Great step forward but if it is still over 50,000 words then there needs to be a new way of doing this.

esolyt• 14 years ago

The reason people don't read these is length, not the organization of the text.

jonny_eh• 14 years ago

Really? Do you have evidence for your statement of fact?

I would think both are a factor.

dave51042• 14 years ago

This doesn't really back up his argument, but Nielsen's done all sorts of research on how much people read:

http://www.useit.com/alertbox/percent-text-read.html

In summary: On the average Web page, users have time to read at most 28% of the words during an average visit; 20% is more likely.

So length is definitely an issue. Not sure on organization, but I really can't see the simpler FAQ style /not/ helping with scanning the page.

drivebyacct2• 14 years ago

Why, oh why, oh why, is that Windows icon so fuzzy. It's like the articles announcing the new logo and Windows 8 that had their respective logos as enlarged JPEGs with artifacts intact. Have some pride.

tylermauthe• 14 years ago

Microsoft is starting to listen.... Interesting turn of events!

BlackJack• 14 years ago

I think "easily readable" is quite a stretch, but I do like the new format and the fact that they're putting effort into improving their ToS. It looks much better than that of most places.

freejack2• 14 years ago

This is anything by easily readable. Ugh. And its not even internally consistent - somewhere down the scroll, the questions fade away and are replaced by the same old lawyer-ism that characterizes most TOS.

I recently re-wrote ours to be more useful and I can't help thinking that whomever did this was rushed and/or got bored or over-challenged by the task about half-way through and just published an incomplete draft. A for effort, C- in execution.

freejack2• 14 years ago

Some day I'll understand the real connection between what I write and how people mod it.

I was really just trying to say that I didn't think at all that it was a very readable document and that if you read through it, the whole "Starts with a question" mode faded away somewhere in the first 1/3 to 1/2 of the document - leaving just a regular old TOS to follow.

grellas• 14 years ago

What caught my eye here is the expert handling of procedures for consumer disputes.

In legalese, this can be summed up as follows: if you live in the U.S., you agree to binding arbitration and to waive any right to participate in a class action (Section 10); before you can initiate arbitration, you are required to give a notice of dispute to Microsoft and to go through a 60-day period of trying to resolve it informally (10.1); nothing in this arrangement prevents you from taking your dispute through small claims court at any time in lieu of arbitration and whether or not you went through informal negotiations first (10.2); if informal negotiation fails or if you do not use small claims court, you agree to give up your right to litigate your dispute before a judge or jury and to pursue your claims exclusively through binding arbitration under AAA rules (10.3); you agree that your claim will be resolved exclusively "on an individual basis" and that it will not be combined with other claims, either in arbitration or in the courts, where a party acts as a representative in a class action (10.4); you agree that the arbitrator can only grant remedies besides a money award (e.g., injunctive relief) only to the extent required to satisfy your individual claim (10.5); if you are an individual and you use the services for personal or household use, or if the value of the dispute is $75,000 or less whether or not you are an individual, your dispute will be resolved under the AAA's special simplified-procedure rules for consumer-related disputes (10.5); you are required to initiate your dispute with AAA either in your county of residence or in King County, WA and Microsoft will promptly reimburse you for your filing fees and will pay for the arbitrator's fees and expenses (10.5, 10.6); in the case of such small disputes, if you reject Microsoft's last written offer made before the arbitrator was appointed and thereafter get a better result when an award is made, Microsoft will pay the greater of the award or $1,000, will pay twice your reasonable attorneys' fees, and will reimburse you for expenses that your attorney incurs in preparing and proving the your claim through arbitration (normal AAA rules on these issues apply if your claim exceeds $75,000) (10.6); in turn, Microsoft will ask for reimbursement of the arbitrator's fees and expenses only if the arbitrator finds that your claim was frivolous or filed for an improper purpose (10.6); all claims are subject to a private statute of limitations expiring within one year (10.8).

Translated, here is what Microsoft is saying:

1. If you have a real problem with us as a consumer, we want to hear about it and deal with it if possible before you initiate a formal fight over it.

2. If we can't agree, we will give you every opportunity possible to make your case easily and without procedural barriers outside the regular court system, whether in small claims court or using streamlined AAA procedures in which we pay all the processing costs, including your filing fees.

3. If our negotiations with you yielded an offer from us that is less than what you get through a formal process, we will pay you even more, including double your attorneys' fees.

4. We will not play games with you by saying that arbitration can be held only on our home turf but will make certain that the prescribed procedures let you fight the battle in your local area, ensuring that you do not face arbitrary obstacles in getting your claim decided.

Whether one agrees with the approach or not, the message here is loud and clear: if you deal with Microsoft as a consumer, there will be no juries (i.e., no realistic chances of getting punitive damage awards), no claims by which lawyers try to get nuisance payouts by grinding little claims through the formal court system, no arbitrations by which lawyers try to use complex discovery, etc. to arbitrarily complicate what should be an otherwise straightforward claim, no class actions (either in court or through attempts to aggregate claims in arbitration), and no broad injunctive or declaratory relief remedies that might disrupt an existing business model.

Many large companies have tried to use binding arbitration to corral consumers into little boxes from which they can only fight at an unfair disadvantage. Perhaps Microsoft is trying to do the same thing here in reality but I doubt it. I read this as Microsoft's declaring, in effect, "we have no problem dealing honestly with real complaints about our service but we're sure not about to let ourselves get set up to pay large awards over inflated claims concocted by lawyers - and we are ready to pay a price directly to the aggrieved consumer (e.g., expense reimbursement, attorneys' fees) for the privilege of being free of the mess that is our modern court system."

Sorry to bore people with legalese but this approach is actually quite innovative and worthy of note and I just thought I would highlight it.

As to format, it is helpful when this is improved but a contract is a contract and, when it has to cover all sorts of potentially complex legal possibilities for services offered throughout the U.S. and the world, it can only be simplified so much. It can be made clean and clear in its wording - and that is what makes for deft handling from the lawyer side - but, in the end, reading a complex Terms of Service agreement will always remain somewhere between a visit to the dentist and having to read through a 10-page 6-point-type insurance policy in terms of how we can relate to it. That is just a fact of life, unfortunately.

menacingly• 14 years ago

Like virtually everything else about which people say "this should be better!", it's not as simple as it sounds to toss up a 500 word document that covers the bases.

It's an attempt to convey something very precise (a legal document) in an imprecise format (English). We should be more sympathetic. We have formal languages, they don't. If we had to explain the operation of quicksort in written prose to use and communicate it, we'd quickly develop some long-winded idioms that got frequently reused.

Think of it not as English, but as a coordinated layer of precise rules on top of English that results in very verbose output when compiled.

Any attempt to shorten it to "plain English" also takes on the liability of any ambiguities you almost certainly introduce in shortening it.

mitchty• 14 years ago

A counterpoint is that Japan's emperor had to be translated when he addressed his citizens about Japan surrendering in WW2. While he spoke Japanese, he did not speak Japanese any common non-royal Japanese could understand.

This isn't much different, the goal is to convey the ideas and/or goals of the document to those that do not speak the language, in this case the same language the document is written in (human language that is, not legal/vs non). It is a good start too, more companies need to do this. If they spell out things such as: arbitration is us just not wanting to go to court, not as a way to sue you, it greatly reduces the invectives that people will assume about the company.

While it might be "obvious" to someone that can read legal print, conveying the goals in regular language to the target audience is in my opinion long overdue in the legal world. Yes it won't convey every minute nit-picky detail.

Just like translating "saudade" from Portuguese to English as lets say nostalgia is likely wrong and not 100% accurate, it will at least get the general point across to a non-portuguese speaker.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saudade if you've never come across the word before. One of my favorite words for an emotion.

sigkill2• 14 years ago

I just wonder how much unambiguous but longer it would be if the EULA/TOS was translated into pseudocode or any programming language. One thing that's certain is that it will be very precise...

eliasmacpherson• 14 years ago

It would be really great if they did the same for their EULAs.

joshwil• 14 years ago

http://www.zdnet.com/microsoft-radically-overhauls-license-a...

sigkill2• 14 years ago

As a sidenote, I copied the text into the http://www.BlaBlaMeter.com bullshit detector and the first 15000 characters returned a value of [0.82, "This reeks"]

tjohns• 14 years ago

My favorite is still the ToS for 500px: http://500px.com/terms

Each section of legalese has a plain text explanation to the right of it, which makes the document very easy to read and understand.

Microsoft updates their Terms of Service to an easily readable Q&A format

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