TL;DR TOS are quite refreshing! Of course I'd be interested to hear if this opens them up to any liability due to the summaries inherent imprecision... Can any lawyers chime in on this?
Before using any of the 500px services, you are required to
read, understand and agree to these terms. You may only create
an account after reading and accepting these terms. The column
on the right provides a short explanation of the terms of use
and is not legally binding.
Obligatory IANAL, but that explicit statement probably covers them from any potential liability from providing summaries.
The trouble is, in most jurisdictions contracts are fundamentally about the understanding between the two parties. There has to be a meeting of minds and everyone has to know what the deal is up-front. You can't just sneak in an unreasonable term by including some tricky language written by a $500/hour commercial lawyer at the bottom of page 17, and then expect that the term will stand up in court if the person reading the contract was a legally untrained consumer and it would have taken them several days and hundreds of dollars of legal advice just to understand the agreement for your $10/month service.
In this case, if 500px are presenting a tl;dr of their legal terms in this way, they might be implicitly acknowledging that their detailed terms are too difficult for their customers to understand. If I were them, I would be more worried that a court would hold that, notwithstanding the weasel words at the top, only the summary was binding, because 500px clearly intended that customers might read only that summary and then choose whether or not to enter into the agreement on that basis.
Of course, in law it's rarely that simple, and lawyers do (try to) exclude certain wording such as headings all the time. Hopefully 500px did get proper advice from someone qualified in their own jurisdiction and satisfy themselves that what I've described here isn't really the case. I do appreciate the spirit of what they're trying to do, and I completely agree that absurdly long, detailed and technical on-line agreements make a mockery of anyone's legal system.
Has this been challenged yet in a court, when someone reading only the right-hand column decides they feel all lawsuity? Is this sort of 'user-friendly interface' covered by existing case law?
IANAL either, and I wouldn't touch this or anything else that hadn't been vetted by a professional. To me, on first glance, this smells like class-action bait. "Your Honor, the defendants deliberately misled the plaintiffs by placing a 'simple' Terms of Service on their website, but then hid their true intentions in small print which claimed the obvious, prominent version wasn't legally binding." Who needs that hassle?
I'm not a lawyer, but I have been through the process of litigating a contract in court.
The law does cover this. Contracts are about a meeting of the minds. Do both parties understand and agree to the terms. Things like email, other written communication about the contract or terms are all reviewed at trial. It's amazing how much of the "sneaky" verbage just get thrown out or ignored as unreasonable or not understood.
I'm far from being a lawyer, but I think their back is covered since the full license is next to it. CreativeCommons does the same[1]:
Think of the Commons Deed as a user-friendly interface to
the Legal Code beneath, although the Deed itself is not a
license, and its contents are not part of the Legal Code
itself.
