Restatement (Third) of Presumptively Unread Contracts

This post from yesterday linked to a funny video where several people unwittingly agreed to some onerous “terms and conditions” in exchange for a chance to win a free iPad and, befitting a “pranked” setup, the people looked a bit foolish in the process.

But they really weren’t foolish. While the surface joke is “ha, ha, look what you get for not reading the contract,” the signing parties were behaving perfectly rationally. When faced with an adhesion contract in a sidewalk-passer-by setting, no one has an opportunity to read much of anything, and the terms aren’t negotiable, anyway. Some 99% of us (or more) scrolled through the last End User License Agreement we saw and hurriedly checked the box labeled, “I have read and understood the foregoing terms,” when we had in fact done nothing of the sort.

The moral of the story–now that we have killed the joke by dissecting it–is that Margaret Jane Radin, our co-blogger Nancy S. Kim, and others have gotten something fundamentally correct: clickwrap and other adhesion contracts really are different, and evaluating them under one-size-fits-all contract doctrine makes little sense.  Perhaps the time has come for a Restatement (Third) of Presumptively Unread Contracts.