With some internet companies' terms and conditions being longer than Shakespeare's Hamlet, could it be that "unfair" clauses in agreements are not even worth the paper they are printed on?

Terms of service online have been in the news in recent years.

In 2012 Facebook's photo-sharing site Instagram updated its privacy policy giving it the right to sell users' photos to advertisers without notification.

Three days later, after a public backlash, the policy was dropped, citing "not communicating clearly".

A month later the number of people using the site was believed to have dropped by nearly 50%.

Yet companies continue to test the boundaries of what consumers are willing to accept.

"Apple reserves the right at any time to modify this agreement and to impose new or additional terms," the iTunes terms of service says.

But most people probably will not have read that when signing up to iTunes.

Enforcable in Europe? Doubt it.
But who's got the time and the money to go to court over it?

They should be simplified to a single A4 page for easy printing. With software if they have simple terms like copyright remains with the developer, and no right to reverse engineer the software. There could be a few other terms but they do not require thousands of pages to declare.

Ideally, you need to specify the minimum font height and a mandatory typeface so that people don’t start getting clever with type sizes and fonts with tiny x-heights.

Why not simplify it as much as possible and leave out most of the jargon?

But if we did that, what would the lawyers do?