Educational settings are one of the worst places where insidious terms crop up. You often simply don't have a choice.<p>I'm a volunteer firefighter and was registered by my department to take a course with a government-run institution to upgrade my certification.<p>A while back that institution began using Blackboard - a Netherlands company - for all learning materials, whose ToS [1] includes a clause where I must agree to <i>defend and indemnify</i> Blackboard <i>from and against any and all claims, damages, obligations, losses, liabilities, costs or debt, and expenses (including but not limited to attorney's fees) arising from</i> my <i>use of and access to</i> their product, as well as <i>any other party's access and use</i> of the product with my username or password (which I contemplate could occur if Blackboard or the institution were to suffer a data breach).<p>To read the textbook (only available online) there was a similar ToS from yet another third party. You can't access any of the material without explicitly agreeing to both contracts.<p>I was uncomfortable with the clause. For one, I didn't understand why my interaction with my local government institution required me to indemnify two foreign companies with whom I have zero relation (and didn't want any).
Before "cloud services", the institution would have contracted with the vendors themselves to buy the platform, then presented their <i>own</i> contract to me (which is the right way to do this, and which I'd be fine with).<p>I deferred accepting, and reached out to the institution to find out if there was some alternative way to obtain the materials (e.g. in hardcopy). I spent months trying to find alternative arrangements, but the bottom line was nobody cared.<p>I showed it to a commercial lawyer in the department who agreed the clause is nonsensical and he expressed some choice words for the institution foisting this upon its students.<p>I give of my own time and volition do firefighting and rescue (and love doing so!). Nobody was paying me to take this course.<p>In the end I wound up hitting the Accept button, with a deep feeling of having effectively been bullied into it.<p>Compared to some of the other ToS's I've seen out there this one was comparatively mild. I can only imagine how parents must feel when such garbage finds its way into their kids' learning environments.<p>[1] <a href="https://help.blackboard.com/Terms_of_Use" rel="nofollow">https://help.blackboard.com/Terms_of_Use</a> and <a href="https://tosdr.org/en/service/2230" rel="nofollow">https://tosdr.org/en/service/2230</a>