Plain English campaign - can we apply that in academia too please?
Here in Germany the AGB (allgemeine Geschäftsbedingungen - got to love German nouns) are ridiculously long and companies frequently like to wriggle out of responsibility by citing them and pointing out that you should read them, even though they are often somewhat hidden and in microscopic type. I once printed out a receipt from an online purchase and got one page of invoice to ten pages of AGB. As a reasonably fluent but non-native German speaker they're pretty much impossible to decipher, especially as they also make references to various paragraphs in the law books that everyone is expected to know or be able to look up. Native German speakers can also not understand most of them either. It makes me weep.
I think the important part here, both for the lawyers and the rest of us, is to think about why the T&Cs are there and what the intended purpose is. If it's just to cover arses then it is completely irrelevant whether anyone reads them or not.
If they are intended to actually help people make an informed decision then it's important that people can decipher them and I would go for the Creative Commons style approach that others have mentioned. Then arses are covered and people actually understand what they're getting into too.
A rich layer, somewhat like some of the password/login set-ups for sites like Plaxo might be a good way, but also cause potential accessibility issues.
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