Online Contracting Still Confusing for the Ninth Circuit

We earlier blogged on Nguyen v. Barnes and Noble in which the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals among other things found that where consumers do not affirmatively consent to online agreements by, for example, checking off an “I agree” button, “something more” than a mere hyperlink to the vendor’s Terms of Service is required to make sure that consumers have at least constructive notice of the agreement.  Said the Court: “Where a website makes its terms of use available via a conspicuous hyperlink on every page of the website but otherwise provides no notice to users nor prompts them to take any affirmative action to demonstrate assent, even close proximity of the hyperlink to relevant buttons users must click on – without more – is insufficient to give rise to constructive notice.”

This opinion is striking for a number of different reasons.  First, in this digital age, couldn’t online shopping in and of itself be said to constitute constructive notice of the online vendor’s terms of use?  In other words, online shoppers today must be said to have come to expect that when they buy from at least well-established vendors such as, here, Barnes and Noble, there will necessarily be terms to which the parties are bound (presuming, of course, that there is a contract to begin with).  This is especially so with the younger group of consumers.

Conversely, given the above and similar confusion, why in the world wouldn’t companies simply use an “I agree” box to be on the safe side?  Even after the case came out, the Barnes and Noble website does, granted, not feature its “TOS” hyperlink as conspicuously as other links on its website and certainly not as obviously as one would have thought the company would have learned to do after the case (see very bottom left-hand corner of website).

What is more, normally a failure to read a contract before agreeing to its terms does not relieve a party of its obligations under the contract.  In the case, however, the court said that in online cases, “the onus must be on website owners to put users on notice of the terms to which they wish to bind consumers … they cannot be expected to ferret out hyperlinks to terms and conditions to which they have no reason to suspect they will be bound.”  This is similar to a case we blogged about here.

However, it would probably be hard to find an online shopper in today’s world who would truly not expect that somewhere on the website, there is likely a link with terms that the corporation will seek to enforce.  The duty to read should arguably be extended to reading websites carefully as well.  Another medium is at stake than the paper contracts of yesteryear, but that doesn’t necessarily change the contents.  But that is not the law in the Ninth Circuit as it stands today, as evidenced by this case, which unfortunately fails to clarify exactly what the courts think would be enough to constitute constructive notice.  So for now, “something more” is the standard.  Perhaps this is an issue of “millenials” versus a slightly older generation to which some of the judges deciding these cases belong.