Are websites adequately communicating terms & conditions link in a browse-wrap agreement?
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The recent Canadian Supreme Court decision in Century 21 said that a browse wrap agreement is enforceable once the presence of the link providing the terms and conditions (hereinafter t&c) is adequately communicated to the user of the website. In a browse wrap unlike the act of clicking in a click wrap, an agreement becomes enforceable once the user moves beyond the homepage of a website. The act of moving beyond is deemed as the acceptance of the existing t&c. Browse wrap’s enforceability thus depends on the way a website chooses to communicate the t&c link to the user. In comparison to the European courts, the American courts have mostly dealt with matters related to enforceability of browse-wrap agreement and have issued number of guidelines on adequate communication of the t&c link. Based on the guidelines issued by the American and Canadian courts, this article looks at the trend in communication practices of websites registered in Europe. In this context, the communication methods undertaken by websites are assessed from data collected in the course of an empirical survey. While concluding, this article shows that the websites in the sample do not adequately communicate the presence of the t&c link, and thereby pointing to a trend that may affect enforceability of browse-wrap agreements in European websites.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.027 | 0.126 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.008 | 0.010 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.014 | 0.012 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.005 |
| Research integrity | 0.004 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.005 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".