Legalease has never looked so good
A cartoonist has undertaken his biggest challenge yet: trying to make legal disclaimers interesting.
Robert Sikyorak is over half way through creating an unabridged, illustrated version of the iTunes’ terms & conditions.
The American professional illustrator, who is best known for turning literary classics into comic book adaptations, has used different comic book art styles to illustrate the extensive iTunes T&Cs document produced by Apple’s lawyers.
Posting a new page of illustrations each day to his personal Tumblr account, Silyorak is currently on instalment 51 of 94 of what is arguably the most tediously boring subject matter for a comic book in history.
Having said that, we should probably not forget the European Commission’s attempt at trying to explain competition law using a comic. Legal Cheek still shudders whenever that is mentioned.
Silyorak’s illustrations — which often mimic the style of Belgian cartoonist Georges Remi’s Tin Tin — pays homage to Apple founder Steve Jobs who passed away in 2011.
Sikyorak, who came up with the idea last year after joking around with a friend, only began posting the comics last month. In blogosphere interviews the illustrator admitted he initially had concerns that there could have been legal repercussions from the tech giant if it did not see the funny side of his work, but so far he hasn’t heard anything.
However, in June of this year Apple’s lawyers decided to throw a different sort of spanner in the works. With Sikyorak half way through his project — he did all the illustrations before he started posting them on Tumblr in September — Apple’s legal team updated and revised iTunes’ terms & conditions. Happily, all was not lost, with the result being that Sikyorak had to add a further 20 pages.
Speaking to Observer.com, the New Jersey born illustrator, reflected:
Doing this was sort of an antidote to a text that I had too much respect for. This was the first text that I’ve adapted before I’ve read all of it. There’s something kind of subversive about taking legalese and making it more readable.
Legal Cheek reached out to Sikyorak to see if he would be willing to illustrate the Civil Procedure Rules, but as yet has received no response.