> To my knowledge a contract requires (at a minimum) a meeting of minds and consideration. You cannot agree to something you did not know about.
If you use software that auto-accepts everything sent to it, it may not create a contract, but that doesn't necessarily mean it doesn't create a prima facie reasonable expectation by the other party that you agreed to a contract. Especially if the software you intentionally set up is specifically designed to simulate a human action like clicking a button.
If that has any negative consequences for the other party, you could be on on the hook for various kinds of negligence or fraud. You might even find out you did have a contract. A corporation can be held to a contract if it's accepted by an employee who a reasonable counterparty would have expected to have the authority to accept it... even if that employee was specifically told not to accept it and therefore did not have that authority. Computers aren't the only things that can go wrong.
Try auto-submitting a bunch of Amazon orders and refusing to pay.
It probably doesn't apply for this particular email nonsense, because if you're just using some email provider that practically everybody uses, a court's naturally going to be inclined to say that you've met the ordinary standard of care. I mean, I would say it's negligent and stupid to use any of the big email providers, but I'm not in charge.
The people who should be in actual trouble would be Microsoft. But of course that's heretical and won't happen.
> And I say that's a good thing given that non-humans cannot enter into agreements, and there are plenty of non-humans who have no idea what they're getting themselves into in the current form of electronic agreements.
Billions of dollars worth of securities trading happens per day without human approval. I wouldn't be surprised if it's actually trillions. Nobody gets out of those contracts if they intentionally set up software to trade. Not even if their software has horrible bugs and submits orders they'd never have approved manually.
If you use software that auto-accepts everything sent to it, it may not create a contract, but that doesn't necessarily mean it doesn't create a prima facie reasonable expectation by the other party that you agreed to a contract. Especially if the software you intentionally set up is specifically designed to simulate a human action like clicking a button.
If that has any negative consequences for the other party, you could be on on the hook for various kinds of negligence or fraud. You might even find out you did have a contract. A corporation can be held to a contract if it's accepted by an employee who a reasonable counterparty would have expected to have the authority to accept it... even if that employee was specifically told not to accept it and therefore did not have that authority. Computers aren't the only things that can go wrong.
Try auto-submitting a bunch of Amazon orders and refusing to pay.
It probably doesn't apply for this particular email nonsense, because if you're just using some email provider that practically everybody uses, a court's naturally going to be inclined to say that you've met the ordinary standard of care. I mean, I would say it's negligent and stupid to use any of the big email providers, but I'm not in charge.
The people who should be in actual trouble would be Microsoft. But of course that's heretical and won't happen.
> And I say that's a good thing given that non-humans cannot enter into agreements, and there are plenty of non-humans who have no idea what they're getting themselves into in the current form of electronic agreements.
Billions of dollars worth of securities trading happens per day without human approval. I wouldn't be surprised if it's actually trillions. Nobody gets out of those contracts if they intentionally set up software to trade. Not even if their software has horrible bugs and submits orders they'd never have approved manually.