Conclusion of online contract - Research Paper Example

Nowadays, more and more people turn to online agreements, sometimes even preferring them to the traditional written ones. However, consumers cannot help concerning about the validity of the online contracts versus the common written contracts. Yet, “Electronic contracts and electronic signatures are just as legal and enforceable as traditional paper contracts signed in ink.”1 This fact was established by the Electronic Signatures in Global and International Commerce Act (ESGICA) in 2000, which has updated the status of online agreements, considering them just as legal and enforceable as the written ones.

This topic has been chosen due to the growing popularity of the online agreements among the ordinary users and other interested people. The term paper is focused on revealing the essence of the online agreements. The author believes that such a paper is necessary, because of the ascending number of concluded online agreements. Sometimes, a user is not even aware of the fact that he is binding himself to a contract in the online jungle. The online contracts are mostly governed by the same legal traditional principles as the written contracts, consisting of the same elements.

The majority of the electronic agreements is reduced to the click through and click wrap agreements. These types of contracts require that the user should scroll through the terms and conditions on a website and confirm that he or she has accepted the terms and conditions of the agreement by taking some sort of action, such as clicking an "I accept" button or by taking some similar action. It is very often that the enforceability of the forum selection clause in these "click-wrap" agreements is at issue since these clauses may force the plaintiff to bring his or her action in a particular jurisdiction, which may be located far away from the plaintiffs home jurisdiction, in order to settle all disputes.

The author intends to