As Tom Waits once sang, “the large print giveth and the small print taketh away”. The devious loopholes and hidden snares obscured by pages upon pages of legalese is a common enough trope in fiction, as well as in real life, where the foolhardy individuals who sign contracts they haven’t read often find themselves coping with more than they bargained for.

Nowadays though, despite all these warnings, many of us are still guilty of clicking “Accept” on lengthy End User License Agreements without ever really trying to work out what they say. However as these examples show, whether you’re dealing with a physical contract or an online agreement, it’s still vital to read the fine print.

Crappy Connectivity

Manchester-based public wifi company Purple sought to demonstrate the dangers inherent in lengthy and opaque user agreements by intentionally inserting an outrageous clause into their terms of service agreement and seeing how many people would fall for it. The company is responsible for hotspots for locations such as Legoland and Pizza Express and, for two weeks, included a clause legally requiring the user to perform 1,000 hours of community service in exchange for internet access. In that time, more than 22,000 people agreed to perform tasks such as picking up dog faeces in parks or cleaning portable toilets at festivals, whereas only one person claimed the cash prize offered for those who spotted the clause and emailed the company about it.

Bonus Betting with Bonus Print

While fine print is a staple of almost all industries, it is perhaps most vital to pay attention to it when there are large amounts of money on the line. Betting bonus offers are one great example, in which gambling companies will compete to offer the most eye-catching promotional deal, only to clarify them at further length in much smaller font. For this reason, it’s important to review all terms and conditions before you sign up to any offers, either on the company’s website or by contacting their support team. For those who like to be extra secure, it’s also wise to double-check the credentials of the casino before taking advantage of their offer. Licensed sites backed by a legitimate organisation are far more likely to have fair terms, which takes away much of the need to worry and pick through the legalese. Alternatively, many timid gamblers like to rely on third-party recommendations of various offers, such as the bonus betting offers suggested for Canadian gamblers by this site, to ensure that they are not going to be duped out of their hard-earned cash.

T&Cs (and M&Ms)

Yet another reason to pore over fine print is that, if you’re the kind of venue manager trying to book musicians like Van Halen, it could cost you your headline act! Van Halen’s contract with venues is well-known for including the hidden condition that the backstage area is supplied with a bowl of M&Ms with all the brown ones taken out. Given that Britney Spears’ rider notoriously requests a framed picture of Princess Diana, you would be forgiven for thinking this is just typical primadonna antics. However, in actual fact, Van Halen included this line to check to check that the venue had read the many other pages of safety requirements carefully, which were necessary given the show’s inclusion of pyrotechnics and flying harnesses. If the brown-less M&M bowl was not included, there was, therefore, grounds to cancel the show in the name of audience (and performer) safety.

“MANDM” (CC BY 2.0) by Dominic Rooney

Weapons of Musical Destruction

While you might expect bizarre fine print from small companies with a point to prove or musicians, you might be surprised to learn that the iTunes EULA also includes one very curious line, albeit for a very legitimate reason. It insists:

“You also agree that you will not use these products for any purposes prohibited by United States law, including, without limitation, the development, design, manufacture or production of nuclear, missiles, or chemical or biological weapons.”

This line is included, despite being now obsolete, because iTunes’ use of encryption technology used to mean it classified as a weapon under US law and was therefore subject to the same export and usage restrictions.

“iTunes” (CC BY 2.0) by JeepersMedia

So there you have it! Even if you don’t get out of any scrapes through reading the fine print, you might just learn something interesting in the process.