Terms and Conditions Writer Wins Short Story Competition With Passage From Software License Agreement

A passage from a commercial software end-user license agreement has won first prize in the annual Pemberton Literary Review short fiction competition after being submitted by its author, corporate attorney and aspiring writer Clarissa Boilerplate, who entered it as an experiment after her creative writing workshop described her fiction as 'too legalistic.' 'They said my short stories read like contracts,' Boilerplate explained. 'So I submitted an actual contract. It won.' The winning entry, a 3,000-word excerpt from the licensing terms for a cloud storage application, was submitted under the title 'The Binding' and entered in the competition's experimental fiction category. Judges, who were unaware of the text's origin, praised it unanimously. 'The narrator's voice is simultaneously omniscient and indifferent,' wrote judge Dr. Helena Prose. 'The protagonist — identified only as the User — exists in a state of total subjugation to an entity referred to as the Company. The User has no agency. Every action requires consent. Every consent is irrevocable. It is Kafka by way of Silicon Valley.' The passage includes the sentence: 'By clicking Accept, the User acknowledges that the Company may modify these terms at any time without notice and that the User's continued use of the Service constitutes acceptance of any such modifications.' This sentence was highlighted by judges as 'a devastating portrait of modern powerlessness.' 'Nobody reads these documents,' Boilerplate said. 'I write 40,000 words a year that no human being ever reads. Entering one in a fiction competition was partly a joke and partly a cry for help. The fact that it won suggests either that legal writing is art or that literary fiction has become indistinguishable from a software license. I'm not sure which is worse.' The Pemberton Literary Review has published the excerpt in its spring issue. The software company whose license agreement it was excerpted from has not commented, though their legal department is reportedly 'reviewing the situation.'