End-user License Agreement - Criticism

Criticism

One common criticism of end-user license agreements is that they are often far too lengthy for users to devote the time to thoroughly read them. In March 2012, the PayPal end-user license agreement was 36,275 words long and in May 2011 the iTunes agreement was 56 pages long, with the news sources reporting these findings asserting that nobody reads them because of their length.

Several companies have parodied this fact by adding unusual clauses to their end-user license agreement knowing that few users will ever read them. As an April Fool's Day joke, Gamestation added a clause stating that "By placing an order via this Web site on the first day of the fourth month of the year 2010 Anno Domini, you agree to grant Us a non transferable option to claim, for now and for ever more, your immortal soul," which 7,500 users agreed to. Although there was a checkbox to exempt out of the "immortal soul" clause, few users checked it and thus GameStation concluded that 88% of their users did not read the agreement. The program PC Pitstop included a clause in their end-user license agreement stating that anybody who read the clause and contacted the company would receive a monetary reward, but it took four months and over 3,000 software downloads before anybody collected it. The main plot of the South Park episode HumancentiPad was that Kyle did not read the terms of service for his last iTunes update an therefore had inadvertently agreed to have Apple employees experiment upon him.