Inspection of general terms and conditions in subscription agreements

Subscription agreements are the types of agreements that provide subscribers an opportunity to have goods or services in regular intervals or continuously. General terms and conditions, which is common in all types of agreements, are included in subscription agreements as well. Subscriber can not comprehend these terms and conditions in most of the cases. Even if the subscriber understands the terms and conditions successfully, he/she does not have an opportunity to change them. For this reason, subscribers must comply with these terms and have problematic consequences. Subscribers are unjustly treated especially by adding terms against the benefits of the subscriber. Due to violation of fairness of the agreement and balance of interest in subscription agreements with general terms and conditions, protection of the subscriber has become a necessity. The terms and conditions that are against the subscriber are audited by the Consumer Protection Law and Turkish Code of Obligations. In our thesis, we investigated the general terms and conditions in subscription agreements in the scope of article 6502 of Consumer Protection Law. The study consists of three parts. Historical development, definition, elements, properties, types and ending reasons of subscription agreements are discussed in the first part. In the second part, the effect of definition, elements, pros and cons, qualifications, applications and inspection of the general terms and conditions on the validity of subscription agreements is investigated. The last part is about the Annex No. 1 of Directive on Unfair Terms in Consumer Contracts titled "Unfair Agreement Terms" which contains 17 articles.