I received an email a few minutes ago from Sony’s Playstation.com since I have a Playstation.com account and I’ve used their site before. It was one of those generic, boilerplate “We have updated our Terms of Service and need to inform you blah blah blah blah” things.
I don’t know what compelled me, but for some odd reason I clicked on it. I never do this, so who knows what happened. Maybe the coffee is making me edgy.
At any rate, I was greeted with this… Wait.. WHAT?
The first line I read was:
We try to avoid putting those annoying ®, ©, and ™ marks and loads of itty bitty type on every page, but we’re telling you now that everything on this site is copyrighted and trademarked by us or one of our partners, unless we say otherwise. This means you can’t just use the stuff (no matter how amazing it looks) without our written permission. And we’ve got to be honest up front: even if you came up with a totally cool idea that we were really excited about, it’s not very likely our lawyers would let you use our stuff, even if you asked nicely. So you may want to just enjoy it while you’re here.
That is AWESOME. This is the most well written, easy to grasp Terms of Service I’ve EVER seen. If more companies caught on and started writing their ToS in this style, I’d start reading ’em.
As it stands, I don’t know anybody that doesn’t just click “yes” “next” “yes” “ok” when presented with pages upon pages of legalese. Perhaps this is the cure.
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