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Comment by kevincox | Hacker News Reader

IANAL but if you agreed to a fixed term contract you can't just inform the other party that you are leaving early. You need to use an exit clause within the contract or somehow invalidate it. (For example by saying that you didn't knowingly enter into a 1 year contract.)

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> IANAL but if you agreed to a fixed term contract you can't just inform the other party that you are leaving early.

Also IANAL, but he whole point is that the user is still in the 14 days "free trial, just cancel", and Adobe is refusing to honor the "cancel" part, right? This approach can be handy, specially in countries where there is a way to send legally valid electronic notification letters.

No, during the first 14 days you can actually cancel for free. This is talking about months later when you discover the "annual commitment" part for the first time. It's a perfectly legal contract, just deceptive.

> It's a perfectly legal contract

Is it? You can't actually just write whatever you want in the fine print and then claim that that is what was agreed to.

IANAL but I've successfully done exactly this. Told them I wouldn't be paying any longer and denying the charges on my card. Support sent me a grumpy email that I violated my contract and that's it.

According to them I won't be able to resubscribe with that email. Oh no! Anyways...

> (For example by saying that you didn't knowingly enter into a 1 year contract.)

I'm also not a lawyer, but I don't think its ever a reasonable defense to say that you didn't know the terms of the contract if you've signed it (or agreed to the terms online - which I'm sure is provable by Adobe)?

I'm pretty sure it is. I believe the technical term is "Misrepresentation". I don't think it would be an easy fight but it seems that you could try to make an argument that they represented the contract as monthly. There are also examples of ToS being declared invalid because no reasonable person read them, this sounds similar where no one is actually reading the fine print.

While this case may be hard I'm pretty sure it isn't "never". For example if you are buying a subscription to a software suite and they sneak into the contract "You also give us your house" that isn't going to fly, even if you signed it.

I get your point - and also that 'never' is not the right word - but I don't think the defense is that you didn't read the contract. There are plenty of cases where people get screwed over for not reading a contract.

E.g. if ToS said I needed to give up my first born to Adobe, the judge isn't going to side with me because I didn't read the ToS. They will side with me because the clause isn't valid.

To build on that, allow me to offer a real-world example: a General Contractor I worked with set up as his standard contract as a triplicate form, so you'd sign once and you'd keep one of the triplicate copies as your copy of the contract. The trick was that the back of the triplicate form was where he put the penalties for breaking the contract, but the signature section was on the front, so there was no indication that there were more terms on the back. One of his customers got fed up with his misbehavior, and he lost the ensuing court case because the contract was deemed to be misleading (hiding more clauses after the signature).

I'm not sure if this would fall into the same boat, but if the dark patterns get misleading enough, there is a real-world risk that the contract would fall into the same situation: misleading enough that the hidden portions of the contract can't be applied.

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