You May Avoid Coronavirus Contacts, But You Can't Avoid Online Contracts

While people have moved their activities online to avoid coronavirus contacts, we can be pretty sure they aren't avoiding coronavirus-era contracts. A lot of online activity involves automatically created contracts, and recent court rulings have facilitated the creation of binding online agreements.

Legal terms of service underlie most online activities, and users of online services consent to those terms in various ways. Merely browsing a website may subject the user to the website's legal terms, although courts often won't take those so-called "browse-wrap" contracts too far, because of the lack of explicit user assent. For binding enforceable contracts that may include unexpected terms, courts have usually required some affirmative assent from the user-often, the user clicking to signify that he or she agreed to the terms of service (which, of course, the user hardly ever actually reads). These "click-through" or "clickwrap" deals have been the gold standard