It’s common to receive a mail from some service that they’re changing the terms and conditions of their service (internet provider, gmail, etc.) These changes are unilateral and can be about anything, from their privacy policy to the money they intend to charge me.
Why can’t I unilaterally send them a mail and say, I am changing the terms of my patronage and will now insert my new policy (pay only xx amount, or demand a mint Chico chip ice cream every Tuesday)?
you can! if they agree to that contract. which is incredibly unlikely.
NOTE - This happened in russia
https://detechter.com/man-creates-credit-card-sues-bank-for-not-paying/
I tried doing this with my landlord. I moved my business into a building with the understanding that after a year I would buy it. Around the year mark the LL started dragging his feet about the Salé and started to say he was going to open a business in one of the vacant suites, or boot a tenant he kept having issues with, and open in their suite.
Then the disliked tenant had a fire that severely damaged the building. While repairs were in progress the LL agreed to sell the building to the problem tenant without any word to me. The sale was over a year out when I had to renew my lease. He sent me a word doc to sign, it had his signature already added. I added a clause saying if he was to sell I had to decline in writing before he could sell. He only noticed because it changed the page count of the lease.
I really wish I had added it to my initial lease.
Imagine scaling down the font and them not noticing… would’ve been glorious.
Unfortunately (or fortunately, probably) contract law doesn’t really work that way. If you sneakily change a contract or even verbally misrepresent what’s in that contract, it can be challenged in court.
It can be difficult to prove though. For example, if a car sales person verbally says your car payment will be $100 but the contract you sign says $1,000 then you can argue in court that they misrepresented what you signed and the $100 should stand. But it’s hard to prove what was said was different than what was signed.
Same concept if your landlord signed something, sent it to you to sign and you modified it to something else without communicating a change. If they can show the original document they sent you, you’re boned.
At least in the UK, that kind of unilateral change also comes with a free contract break - if you don’t like it, you can quit without paying a y penalty charges.
You can probably try to do similar to them… They will just fire you as a customer.
A valid contract under US common law (which has it’s roots in English common law) requires three things: offer, acceptance, and consideration (which means each side gives up a legal right in exchange for something, i.e. you become bound to pay a monthly fee in exchange for the other side being obligated to provide a service). So when a company sends you a contract with pre-set terms (an offer), you can either sign that pre-drafted contract (acceptance), ignore it (rejection), or change one or more terms and send it back to the drafter to either accept or reject (rejection and counter-offer).
Every time language is changed it rejects the previous offer and creates a new counter offer. You don’t have a “contract” until an offer is accepted with no changes (also known as mutual assent).
As a practical matter, no large company is going to accept a counter-offer for a contract with one consumer. Their entire apparatus is constructed to serve the terms of a form contract. There is no practical way for a company with thousands/millions of customers to honor the unique terms of one customer’s contract.
With that being said, even if a company could theoretically honor the modified contract, they aren’t going to risk it. They would have to have a lawyer or legal employee review it and analyze its costs and benefits to the company. That would cost a lot of money per each modified contract, so the company will simply ignore the changes and move on the the next customer.
That’s the argument that it shouldn’t be an enforceable contract. The company is unilaterally establishing terms with no opportunity to negotiate, which is not a valid contract. Unfortunately it seems to be treated as one in our dystopia
I can’t find it, but I seem to recall back in the day this one absolute legend of a chanced got a contract from his bank. He wrote a new contract, which he carefully designed to be visually similar to the one he received, but which gave him incredibly favourable terms with massive penalty fees on the bank should they try to renege on it. Nobody at the bank noticed the signed contract wasn’t the one they had sent out, leaving them on the hook. And since they had freely agreed to it, a judge ruled it was valid and enforceable.
From another comment here https://detechter.com/man-creates-credit-card-sues-bank-for-not-paying/
IANAL. If a bank signs the copy they receive back from the counterparty, then generally yeah, it would be enforceable. Contract law demands that result, because otherwise there’d be no point to the words on the document. Working in the other party’s favor would be any lack of notice shortly after the bank signs the contract, because the longer the bank takes to notice a problem, the easiest it is to prove that they did not exercise the appropriate care when signing, incurring all consequences as a result. Missing more and more opportunities to recast or renegotiate the contract, that’s a poor position to defend.
That said, the other party must not have made any implied or explicit statements that the bank could have relied upon. Returning the modified contract to the bank in an email with the words “please find the signed contract attached” (my emphasis) could ambiguously imply that the original contract has been unmodified except that it has gained the other party’s signature.
Whereas the words “please find my signed proposal attached” would dispell any and all ambiguity, because it would clearly be a proposed contract by the other party, not the bank’s original proposal. Alternatively, a blank email with just the attachment is no statement at all, implied or explicit.
To be clear, a bank would almost certainly contest the contract, even if they don’t have a leg to stand on. And the usual reason for this – besides litigiousness – is that it’s the only way for the bank’s business insurance to pay out. Or at the very least, an attempt to slightly lower the damages by opening settlement talks.
NAL but I think you could. But just as you don’t have to agree to a T&C change (they just bank on you to not stopping to use their service), they don’t have to either. So if you were to send an enforceable email, I’m sure they’d cancel you.
This is pretty much it. We all bitch and complain about changes in the agreement, but you always have the option of not accepting those terms. It’s just that once the products and services get their teeth in us, we don’t want to give that up, so we click agree and obey our masters.
A significant counter example is click wrap. You can’t see the terms before you buy and you can’t reject it and get your money back.
Every instance of trying to set terms after purchase should be unenforceable in any just society
Some of it is nearly non negotiable. Like my bank changing their terms and conditions, sure i could go to another bank, but they’ve probably already got the same terms and conditions or the same changes coming. And it can be very difficult to live a normal life without a bank account.
I agree completely.
I now see how it may have sounded like I was recommending that everyone quit using these services. If you can break free, that’s great, but I know that’s rarely a possibility without completely complicating our own lives.
They know they got us by the balls. That’s why they do it.
You can. But the prefilled one implies they’re already OK with the terms. Adding/changing stuff requires their approval. If both parties agree to the altered version, then there’s no problem.
I doubt they’ll allow a special case just for you, though.
I have returned additions/corrections to employment contracts and had them accepted. My usually go to is to change the overly broad “we own all IPRs developed by you” to “we own all IPRs that come from work related tasks or as a direct furtherance thereof”. If they want to own anything I developed outside work for my own projects then that’s fine, but then they’d have to pay extra.
The first time I rented an apartment, they sent me a lease to sign, and I made a bunch of addendums and changes, and sent it back.
They said “nah” and sent me the same lease to sign.
20 something me was was like “what the hell”
The contracts almost always have a clause that says they can change the terms and conditions at any time. There is no such clause saying you can do the same, but you probably could; they just wouldn’t agree to it.
Tho, depending on what you’re talking about: It might not be a real contract (see: terms of service agreements for software where you never sign anything).
You want to blame Singer Sewing Machine company for this. They’re the ones in the 1850s that came up with the idea of pre-made non-negotiable contracts. Before this, every single contract had to have lawyers adding and removing terms until both sides agreed to it. I know today’s version sucks, but the alternative could be worse.
Imagine having to bring (and pay!) your lawyer to a car dealership to buy a car or even sign up for Netflix. Imagine how much more expensive the goods and services would cost you because of the army of lawyers needed to negotiate contracts for every single consumer.
You can try, but you sure know the corpo will fight it in court when you try to enforce it.
They’re providing a service, so it’s not really up to you to determine a new price or features of that service. But you have the right to decide you don’t want to continue it, or change it within the boundaries that they’ve said you can. There may be consequences of stopping or changing the contract terms, which are most likely spelled out in that contract somewhere.
I don’t have time to review all the changes that are constantly made to terms and conditions.
Guess I won’t use anything ever then.
If you and I make a contract, and then I turn around and change some terms with crayon, it’s not like you’re beholden to the new ones.
The one who dictates the terms of service is the one who provides the “service”, questionable though it might be. You agree to it when you sign up. When they change it up on you, it is with the assumption you’ll quit if you disagree strongly enough to the changes.
