Fresh court filing accuses Oracle of creating 'maze' of options 'hidden' in 'contract' Oracle faces a class action lawsuit over allegations it has failed to deliver on its promises including a new claim that it "obfuscates" onerous contract terms in "hidden" documents. Big Red denies the allegations and in June asked an Ohio court to dismiss the claims – alleging the plaintiffs had failed "to identify any …
Usage of tiny print should automatically enable unconditional contract cancellation by the client, unless the tiny print is not related to the contract conditions, but purely for design purposes containing general boilerplate, such as address details etc. Nevertheless such details must also appear as full size print in the document at least once.
Most important parts (related to big money) should appear in the contract first.
I'd go a bit further and change the law generally relating to adverts, marketing blurb, contracts and the like so that in cases of ambiguity the bigger font takes precedence. So if there's preamble about, say, unlimited something in 16 point bold with a note/clarification/disclaimer in 7 point saying that unlimited means limited then the 16 point will automatically apply or be enforceable.
> unlimited
Contracts must also specify maximum accumulated cost possible for the client.
For example, for a public contract: Not to exceed 1,250,000 £, in which case a new public tender must be announced without possibility to extend the contract.
Or for predatory roaming tariffs when traveling abroad: maximum 150£ with obligatory warning message at 75£ spent.
At which point the LLM will boil a half gallon of water, then tell you something very convincing, at random that, sometimes, might contain facts, depending on the statistical probability that facts in the shape of your question were part of its training dataset. Or it might contain very convincing falsehoods. You won't know but you're not getting that water back.
Tiny print. In the days before modernity (ie the mass use of computers). The Associated Examining Board used to have microprinting on their certificates saying over and over again "Associated Examining Board" thousands of times except for one point at a specific position where it said "Associated Examining Go Bard". Quite a useful use of tiny print to spot forgeries.
A couple of weeks ago my bank asked if I wanted them to review my pensions. I said yes, why not.
They then sent me a 160 page agreement to sign to allow them to do this assessment and 10 days to review and sign it.
I'm not at all sure this would be considered reasonable or be able to be enforced in a court. I review contracts fairly regularly as part of my work, but this was just impenetrable.
That depends on where you are. In the UK I'm sure you're right, in the US probably not.
But the whole point of a long and complex document is to discourage people from reading it, or to make it sufficiently complex that the important parts are well hidden and likely to be missed. If my bank sent me something like that I'd not sign it, and I'd be looking for another bank.
If you were compiling a compendium of duplicitous sales practices, this case would seem to have them all. (Sales reps promising things that aren't in the final contract. A final contract that doesn't appear to be final. Reliance on terms not directly included in the contract and which are the digital equivalent of being "on display in the bottom of a locked filing cabinet stuck in a disused lavatory with a sign on the door saying 'Beware of the Leopard'".) Is there anything they've not done?
Surely one of them will catch them out? The linking to a generic site where there are multiply identically named documents seems particularly egregious. You should have to link directly to the relevant document for it to apply. And, frankly, you shouldn't even be able to do that; the contract should have a complete record of all the terms and conditions that apply when it was signed.
Surely that can't be legal by any stretch of the imagination.
Anything hyperlinked can be changed after the contract is signed and you'd be hard pushed to prove what was at the link at the moment the contract was signed. Sounds like a perfect mechanism to defraud customers to me.
I hope that instead of settling out of court, Realogic pursue this all the way to the bitter end. Oracle deserve to be sanctioned for this kind of chicanery.
Companies seem to be able to vary the terms and conditions at will. In my book, if they want to do that, they should have to notify you two months in advance, in writing, and give you the option to terminate the contract without penalty at the date the T&C are varied.
Yup.
eBay and PayPal are specialists in that.
Send out details of contract changes in emails but only links to them so you've no real record, in the hope that very few people will look at them.
And in the main the changes are tiny - a sentence here, a sentence there, no reason they couldn't have referenced in the email itself.
My bank and power company either send things out in writing with all the bits that are changing clearly explained, often with a before and after, or if very simple just spell out the changes in an email.
I'm looking at a new broadband subscription at the moment. Surprising, not, the number of companies that make it very hard or indeed impossible to find their T&C's for stuff like annual increases if they aren't upfront about it, many don't even put links in the signup page so you have to open up their main page and have a hunt from there. Off the list they go of course.
A very few give you a direct link to a PDF rather than a web page so it's easy to download the thing then email it to yourself as a basic record.
Still a load talking about RPI+3.9% which I believe has been banned now, albeit with unforeseen consequences.
In France when you sign the contract to buy a house both parties sit down with a notaire who reads out loud the contract and confirms clause-by-clause that they have understood it. If anything's not understood then the notaire explains it and if they all agree then both parties initial every page and then sign the contract. I assume if you did that with an Oracle contract (or any big-tech EULA) it would take a long time even if you employed the bloke that announces the small print at the end of annoying TV ads, made even longer by regular shouts of, "Hang on - you're taking the piss aren't you? No one told me about that.".
And, in France, the rooms must be precisely measured, because if you buy a house with, say, 40m2 of living room and it turns out to be only 38m2, you can reclaim some of the sale price from the vendor to compensate for this discrepancy.
Additionally, there are seriously arcane rules about things that are movable versus things that are immovable.
When we bought our place, the previous owner said that we could keep the firewood that was in the wood shed (as they were moving to a place with an oil burner). When we turned up, we found the logs lying in a neat line all along the driveway. He had removed them all from the woodshed.
Why? Because if he had left them stocked in the woodshed, it would have given him some sort of right to turn up at some later time to claim his wood, including being able to pursue us legally of we should have used or moved any of his wood in the woodshed on our property. Yes, it's a bit nuts. But by removing all of the wood and leaving it on the ground for us to "collect" and put right back where it came from, he was giving it to us.
On the other hand, one that catches out expats - if you have land you'll find a neighbouring farmer is more than willing to offer to cultivate it for you as part of their crop. Something you don't have to worry about, right? Well, the catch that they don't say is that if it is over a hectare then not only do they have the right to use it for as long as they like from that point onwards, they can also pass this right to other members of their family (should their brothers or children get into farming). This right also allows them to use the land as they see fit for agricultural purposes (including cutting down trees and such) and they're not obliged to pay a single centime in compensation, and most complaints go nowhere as France is very agricultural and the farmers have a lot of power. It's effectively legalised theft of land. Oh, and a verbal "yeah, sure" from the clueless is all that is necessary.
In the US, the rules about movable vs immovable items in real estate transactions are equally arcane. Kitchen cabinets - immovable, so they're part of the sale. Washer and dryer - movable, so not part of the sale. Microwave - depends if it's a built-in or sitting on a cabinet. Refrigerator - could go either way, so has to be specified (one way or the other) in the contract. Shed? err... depends on the construction method, I think; concrete floor would be immovable = part of sale, sitting on ground might be moveable = remains property of sellers...
"In the US, the rules about movable vs immovable items in real estate transactions are equally arcane."
I remember many years ago reading about a court case in UK (Scotland?) where the new owners arrived to find the previous owners had removed *all* internal doors, removed not just light bulbs but also all the ceiling pendant fittings leaving bare wires poking out of the ceilings, lifted up and remove the patio concrete pavers etc, basically they'd stripped the house and garden bare. The court fined the seller for removing such obvious house fixtures.
> previous owners had removed *all* internal doors, removed not just light bulbs but also all the ceiling pendant fittings leaving bare wires poking out of the ceilings
Back in the late 1980's when the UK was going house buying crazy I viewed a house that had been a repossession, just about anything that could be unscrewed (and some that could not!) had been removed and stripped out leaving basically a shell of a house. surprisingly the bedroom carpets were still there so that you could see where the once fitted wardrobes had been ripped out.
Nowhere near as bad as that but when I bought a house in Rushden when we moved in I found the previous owners had removed the heater/lamp from the bathroom leaving (I think) three red and two black wires dangling from the ceiling. First time in my life I'd had to deal with ring mains. Bloody nightmare.
>I found the previous owners had removed the heater/lamp from the bathroom leaving (I think) three red and two black wires dangling from the ceiling...
You were lucky. An old UK friend of mine bought a house, and the previous owners had not only removed the ceiling light fittings - bulbs, pendants, shades and all - but they had "thoughtfully" dealt with the problem of bare dangling wires by twisting the blue & brown wires together and wrapping them in electrical tape.
My friend got a shock - appropriate term - when he took possession of his new home in the gathering gloom of an autumn afternoon, and turned the first light on!
As for myself, well, the first house I bought I found that the sellers had removed, amongst other things: the loo rolls and holders, the wall-mounted toothbrush holder in the bathroom, the (cheap, vinyl) shower curtain, and pretty much all the lightbulbs.
By contrast, the first house I bought here in the States I got a ride-on lawnmower thrown in by the seller because he "didn't have any use for it".
Not sure where you get your information, or which part of the US, but here in the PNW it's absolutely the case that major appliances (washer, dryer, fridge, and yes even microwave) are considered part of the sale, unless the seller and buyer explicitly negotiate otherwise.
And as for sheds being considered moveable... nope, not in any property transaction I've been involved in or even heard of.
That's been the style of the software itself since forever, a million parameters and thousands that NEED to be set or nothing works.
That's been the number one difference between Oracle and SQL Server since about forever.
Now, if you are truly the master of your domain, you can often do some really great things with those million parameters - and even SQL Server has a *few* that can do some magic, but most people never even learn that they're there.
IOW Oracle has always been a giant fiberglass foiling catamaran! I'm not surprised their contract reads the same way.
No surprise says I.
I have previously mentioned that when they were trying to push Java use on Raspberry Pi it was impossible to figure out what the licensing terms actually were even with the guy pushing it 'in the room'.
I would trust Oracle less than a random hobo who knocks on my door promising to tarmac my driveway for just a few grand up front.
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