PC Advisor reports an "analysis" of a few "Terms and Agreements" documents that people routinely click "Agree" on in order to install, join, share, participate, and otherwise "have fun." For software, the usual term is EULA (End User License Agreement) and it would fit in a thread title while "Terms and Agreements" was a little too long. I hope this won't be confusing.

Apple iTunes T&Cs 10% longer than Shakespeare's Macbeth reports that:

Apple iTunes T&Cs 10% longer than Shakespeare's Macbeth
Paypal's T&Cs are longer than Hamlet

By Simon Jary
PC Advisor
22 March 12

Some online, mobile and tech terms and conditions agreements are longer than plays by Shakespeare – with PayPal's T&Cs having a longer word count than Hamlet.

In a report from consumer association Which? Customer T&Cs were added up and compared to Shakespeare's most famous plays. The terms and conditions you have to sign to use Apple's iTunes is longer than Macbeth – which itself sounds like an Apple product.

The iTunes T&Cs – 2,456 words of privacy terms plus 17,516 of terms of use –adds up to 19,972 words, compared to Macbeth's 18,100.

Add in the T&Cs for iOS 5 and iCloud and the word count for Apple's privacy and terms of use reach a whopping 44,062 words – over half the length of Harry Potter And The Chamber of Secrets (84,799).

The word count of PayPal's T&Cs is a whopping 36,275, compared to Shakespeare's Hamlet at 30,066 words.

Facebook's 11,195 words in length – 6,910 words of privacy policy and 4,285 words of terms of use – is about the same length as Einstein's General Theory of Relativity.

Which? tots up all of Google's T&Cs (search, YouTube, Picasa, Chrome, Android, Google Wallet and Google Books) at 10,640 words – which it claims is the length of the average undergraduate dissertation.

Social network Twitter, which restricts users' tweets to a mere 140 characters, has T%Cs that add up to 4,445 words – about half the length of Roald Dahl's The Twits, says Which?.

The latest Apple iOS 5 update for iPhones weighs in at 13,366 – a lot to read on its small screen if downloaded directly on the device.

We await with dread the Terms and Conditions that outweigh Tolstoy's War And Peace at 587,287 words…

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I've got news for them.

Those 3 of us who actually have attempted to read one of these documents will have noted the "inclusion by citation" of other "terms of use" that "protect the rights" of owners of software or other "things" used by the site or software for which the "up front" contract is applied.

When Adobe bought Macromedia, being thoroughly Pi**d with the shoddy maintenance of Macromedia, I downloaded the "Flash" P.O.S. from Adobe to take a look at why a reputable (up until then) bunch like Adobe would want to own it. I found about 14 additional EULAs "incorporated by citation" in the Adobe EULA, so I went to each of them, and found that every one of the "included by citation" agreements "included by citation" at least 5, and in one case 17, other agreements "included by citation."

Copying the original EULA and the additional EULAs "incorporated by citation" at the first level resulted in a document somewhat over 380 pages, so I cut back to copying only a link to each cited additional EULA in the "second tier" of "requirements incorporated by citation in requirements incorporated by citation." This got me slightly past 480 pages.

After that I backed out and followed only "three apparently important" lines of incorporations of incorporations, which got me to around 700 pages at "sixth tier," but with no end in sight.

I followed one string to 8 levels, and ended up with a total of 900 pages of "mostly links" - without copying the full text of any past the first two levels of "agreements."

Unfortunately, I didn't record a word count before I hit Delete and dumped the whole thing. A typical page in Word, as I generally make notes, runs close to 500 words, so I was probably at an equivalent of about 450,000 words recorded, mostly just in links to the actual words.

You can't read one of the %@#!$^ things to any visible end point. (At least that's my present assessment.)

You just have to click "agree" and hope their lawyers don't get annoyed by anything you might do.

John