Imagine your signing up at a new website, you enter your information and then it asks you to click the button saying that you've read the terms of use agreement. You having skimmed one agreement a while ago, assume this one is the same as every other one, and just click the button. Congratulations! You've just sold your soul to the website! This apparently happened this April fools day on an UK game site. The site added the text:
"By placing an order via this Web site on the first day of the fourth month of the year 2010 Anno Domini, you agree to grant Us a non transferable option to claim, for now and for ever more, your immortal soul. Should We wish to exercise this option, you agree to surrender your immortal soul, and any claim you may have on it, within 5 (five) working days of receiving written notification from gamesation.co.uk or one of its duly authorised minions. We reserve the right to serve such notice in 6 (six) foot high letters of fire, however we can accept no liability for any loss or damage caused by such an act. If you a) do not believe you have an immortal soul, b) have already given it to another party, or c) do not wish to grant Us such a license, please click the link below to nullify this sub-clause and proceed with your transaction."
Obviously if you saw this is an agreement you would click the link to op out of this. As it turns out most of the people that had transactions on the site that day either did not care about selling their souls or were just lazy and didn't read the terms agreement. My opinion in the latter. Your probably wonder what this has to do with pop culture or mass media past the obvious of a person using a website or partaking in video games. I'd point out that the people that didn't click the link were probably not paying attention to what the screen actually said and were just trying to "get their video game fix" as quickly as possible. I am just as guilty of not readying a sites terms of use agreement as the next person and I think I would probably have fallen for this joke as well. I have no defense for it other than, who has the patient to read that much fine print? I think this little incident showcases the level of trust society has in a business entities practices. The good news is that the website emailed all the customers that had not opted out of the soul sale to tell them that they were not going to enforce the clause. And let this be a lesson to myself and everyone else: read those terms of agreement and don't agree to sell your soul.
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Whoa. Someone's idea of a joke. :-) It is pretty funny, but rather scary. We ended up with $12.99 being deducted from our bank account every month for an organization called Great Fun. They said we signed up for it. I wonder if it happened this way.
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