
Microsoft updates their Terms of Service to an easily readable Q&A format - spauka
http://windows.microsoft.com/en-US/windows-live/microsoft-services-agreement
======
grellas
What caught my eye here is the expert handling of procedures for consumer
disputes.

In legalese, this can be summed up as follows: if you live in the U.S., you
agree to binding arbitration and to waive any right to participate in a class
action (Section 10); before you can initiate arbitration, you are required to
give a notice of dispute to Microsoft and to go through a 60-day period of
trying to resolve it informally (10.1); nothing in this arrangement prevents
you from taking your dispute through small claims court at any time in lieu of
arbitration and whether or not you went through informal negotiations first
(10.2); if informal negotiation fails or if you do not use small claims court,
you agree to give up your right to litigate your dispute before a judge or
jury and to pursue your claims exclusively through binding arbitration under
AAA rules (10.3); you agree that your claim will be resolved exclusively "on
an individual basis" and that it will not be combined with other claims,
either in arbitration or in the courts, where a party acts as a representative
in a class action (10.4); you agree that the arbitrator can only grant
remedies besides a money award (e.g., injunctive relief) only to the extent
required to satisfy your individual claim (10.5); if you are an individual and
you use the services for personal or household use, or if the value of the
dispute is $75,000 or less whether or not you are an individual, your dispute
will be resolved under the AAA's special simplified-procedure rules for
consumer-related disputes (10.5); you are required to initiate your dispute
with AAA either in your county of residence or in King County, WA and
Microsoft will promptly reimburse you for your filing fees and will pay for
the arbitrator's fees and expenses (10.5, 10.6); in the case of such small
disputes, if you reject Microsoft's last written offer made before the
arbitrator was appointed and thereafter get a better result when an award is
made, Microsoft will pay the greater of the award or $1,000, will pay twice
your reasonable attorneys' fees, and will reimburse you for expenses that your
attorney incurs in preparing and proving the your claim through arbitration
(normal AAA rules on these issues apply if your claim exceeds $75,000) (10.6);
in turn, Microsoft will ask for reimbursement of the arbitrator's fees and
expenses only if the arbitrator finds that your claim was frivolous or filed
for an improper purpose (10.6); all claims are subject to a private statute of
limitations expiring within one year (10.8).

Translated, here is what Microsoft is saying:

1\. If you have a real problem with us as a consumer, we want to hear about it
and deal with it if possible before you initiate a formal fight over it.

2\. If we can't agree, we will give you every opportunity possible to make
your case easily and without procedural barriers _outside_ the regular court
system, whether in small claims court or using streamlined AAA procedures in
which we pay _all_ the processing costs, including your filing fees.

3\. If our negotiations with you yielded an offer from us that is less than
what you get through a formal process, we will pay you even more, including
double your attorneys' fees.

4\. We will not play games with you by saying that arbitration can be held
only on our home turf but will make certain that the prescribed procedures let
you fight the battle in your local area, ensuring that you do not face
arbitrary obstacles in getting your claim decided.

Whether one agrees with the approach or not, the message here is loud and
clear: if you deal with Microsoft as a consumer, there will be no juries
(i.e., no realistic chances of getting punitive damage awards), no claims by
which lawyers try to get nuisance payouts by grinding little claims through
the formal court system, no arbitrations by which lawyers try to use complex
discovery, etc. to arbitrarily complicate what should be an otherwise
straightforward claim, no class actions (either in court or through attempts
to aggregate claims in arbitration), and no broad injunctive or declaratory
relief remedies that might disrupt an existing business model.

Many large companies have tried to use binding arbitration to corral consumers
into little boxes from which they can only fight at an unfair disadvantage.
Perhaps Microsoft is trying to do the same thing here in reality but I doubt
it. I read this as Microsoft's declaring, in effect, "we have no problem
dealing honestly with real complaints about our service but we're sure not
about to let ourselves get set up to pay large awards over inflated claims
concocted by lawyers - and we are ready to pay a price directly to the
aggrieved consumer (e.g., expense reimbursement, attorneys' fees) for the
privilege of being free of the mess that is our modern court system."

Sorry to bore people with legalese but this approach is actually quite
innovative and worthy of note and I just thought I would highlight it.

As to format, it is helpful when this is improved but a contract is a contract
and, when it has to cover all sorts of potentially complex legal possibilities
for services offered throughout the U.S. and the world, it can only be
simplified so much. It can be made clean and clear in its wording - and that
is what makes for deft handling from the lawyer side - but, in the end,
reading a complex Terms of Service agreement will always remain somewhere
between a visit to the dentist and having to read through a 10-page 6-point-
type insurance policy in terms of how we can relate to it. That is just a fact
of life, unfortunately.

------
menacingly
Like virtually everything else about which people say "this should be
better!", it's not as simple as it sounds to toss up a 500 word document that
covers the bases.

It's an attempt to convey something very precise (a legal document) in an
imprecise format (English). We should be more sympathetic. We have formal
languages, they don't. If we had to explain the operation of quicksort in
written prose to use and communicate it, we'd quickly develop some long-winded
idioms that got frequently reused.

Think of it not as English, but as a coordinated layer of precise rules on top
of English that results in very verbose output when compiled.

Any attempt to shorten it to "plain English" also takes on the liability of
any ambiguities you almost certainly introduce in shortening it.

~~~
mitchty
A counterpoint is that Japan's emperor had to be translated when he addressed
his citizens about Japan surrendering in WW2. While he spoke Japanese, he did
not speak Japanese any common non-royal Japanese could understand.

This isn't much different, the goal is to convey the ideas and/or goals of the
document to those that do not speak the language, in this case the same
language the document is written in (human language that is, not legal/vs
non). It is a good start too, more companies need to do this. If they spell
out things such as: arbitration is us just not wanting to go to court, not as
a way to sue you, it greatly reduces the invectives that people will assume
about the company.

While it might be "obvious" to someone that can read legal print, conveying
the goals in regular language to the target audience is in my opinion long
overdue in the legal world. Yes it won't convey every minute nit-picky detail.

Just like translating "saudade" from Portuguese to English as lets say
nostalgia is likely wrong and not 100% accurate, it will at least get the
general point across to a non-portuguese speaker.

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saudade> if you've never come across the word
before. One of my favorite words for an emotion.

------
BlackJack
I think "easily readable" is quite a stretch, but I do like the new format and
the fact that they're putting effort into improving their ToS. It looks much
better than that of most places.

------
s_henry_paulson
It's still long enough that it needs a table of contents with links, as well
as long enough that the only people reading it are people looking for legal
recourse.

~~~
nolok
I'm not sure why you expected any different, better formatting doesn't make a
boring content any less boring; if you don't enjoy legalese pretty colors and
bold sections aren't going to change that.

Still, a lot better than a lot of other TOS out there that you can't properly
read even if you want to because ALL CAPS EVERYWHERE.

~~~
pydave
They could have gone with the CC approach:

For humans: <http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/>

For lawyers: <http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/legalcode>

Granted, Microsoft's lawyers probably wouldn't approve (because people might
argue that they're agreeing to the simplified terms that have wriggle room and
not the iron-clad legalese).

~~~
tedunangst
I think that works for CC because the people using the license are using the
license and not the summary. It's ok if a third party to the licensor provides
a summary.

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tylermauthe
Microsoft is starting to listen.... Interesting turn of events!

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selectout
Great step forward but if it is still over 50,000 words then there needs to be
a new way of doing this.

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tjohns
My favorite is still the ToS for 500px: <http://500px.com/terms>

Each section of legalese has a plain text explanation to the right of it,
which makes the document very easy to read and understand.

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sigkill
As a sidenote, I copied the text into the <http://www.BlaBlaMeter.com>
bullshit detector and the first 15000 characters returned a value of [0.82,
"This reeks"]

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esolyt
The reason people don't read these is length, not the organization of the
text.

~~~
jonny_eh
Really? Do you have evidence for your statement of fact?

I would think both are a factor.

~~~
dave5104
This doesn't really back up his argument, but Nielsen's done all sorts of
research on how much people read:

<http://www.useit.com/alertbox/percent-text-read.html>

In summary: On the average Web page, users have time to read at most 28% of
the words during an average visit; 20% is more likely.

So length is definitely an issue. Not sure on organization, but I really can't
see the simpler FAQ style /not/ helping with scanning the page.

~~~
mattdeboard
I read 0% of 100% of the Terms of Service I encounter because they're not
worth my time to parse. I actually read through this one. Anecdata.

~~~
dave5104
The best kind of data! :P

------
eliasmacpherson
It would be really great if they did the same for their EULAs.

~~~
joshwil
[http://www.zdnet.com/microsoft-radically-overhauls-
license-a...](http://www.zdnet.com/microsoft-radically-overhauls-license-
agreements-for-windows-8-7000002866/)

------
drivebyacct2
Why, oh why, oh why, is that Windows icon so fuzzy. It's like the articles
announcing the new logo and Windows 8 that had their respective logos as
enlarged JPEGs with artifacts intact. Have some pride.

------
freejack
This is anything by easily readable. Ugh. And its not even internally
consistent - somewhere down the scroll, the questions fade away and are
replaced by the same old lawyer-ism that characterizes most TOS.

I recently re-wrote ours to be more useful and I can't help thinking that
whomever did this was rushed and/or got bored or over-challenged by the task
about half-way through and just published an incomplete draft. A for effort,
C- in execution.

~~~
freejack
Some day I'll understand the real connection between what I write and how
people mod it.

I was really just trying to say that I didn't think at all that it was a very
readable document and that if you read through it, the whole "Starts with a
question" mode faded away somewhere in the first 1/3 to 1/2 of the document -
leaving just a regular old TOS to follow.

