On: How Zappos' User Agreement Failed In Court and Left Zappos Legally Naked

[ricardobeat]

How does one prove that at the time a user signed up there was a checkbox/button to accept the terms, not a different version of the page?

[danielweber → ricardobeat]

The same way most other things are proven. Someone in a position of power says "the checkbox was there and we recorded the value, and this was the version of the TOS at the time" under threat of perjury.

[bo1024 → ricardobeat]

Any half-informed Internet user should be saving copies of terms they have agreed to (after reading them thoroughly, of course).

That's sarcasm, but I feel like that's what would be legally argued in court, and it shows how much power websites have compared to their users.

[celticninja → bo1024]

how do you keep a record of terms you have not agreed to, a screen grab of an unchecked box?

[dredmorbius → celticninja]

You could, say, post a digitally-signed repudiation of the ToS. Or, interesting concept, of all ToS terms to which you explicitly do not agree.

Put that somewhere that, say, Internet Archive would get ahold of it. Among the Archive's revenue-generating services is providing notarized copies of data that it's archived, essentially substantiating someone's claims that material was available online at a given point in time.

[charliepark → ricardobeat]

Although I'm sure this could be spoofed easily, whatever version control system you're using almost certainly timestamps commits. You could easily bring up the version of the file that existed at the timestamp of the user's account creation date.