Post by thread:[OT] Legal disclamers on emails.

{Quote hidden}> > > This e-mail is intended for the person it is addressed to only. The > > information contained in it may be confidential and/or protected by > > law. If you are not the intended recipient of this message, > you must > > not make any use of this information, or copy or show it to any > > person. Please contact us immediately to tell us that you have > > received this e-mail, and return the original to us. Any use, > > forwarding, printing or copying of this message is strictly > prohibited. > > Is this supposed to be a parody? > > I must not show it to ANY PERSON, but I must return it to > you, and I can't forward it or print it, or copy it, so HOW > was that supposed to happen? > > The unintended recipient shouldn't have to hire a lawyer to > comply with such a thing. Sadly, there are a number of companies who require that sort of... stuff. You should see the one from my day job... My favorite part is that bit about how I'm not necessarily speaking for the company. The first part isn't so bad actually. I'm lucky in that I run the email server so although I am required to add the legal text to all outgoing mail for the company, I am not required to add it to my own personal emails: "This is a confidential message, intended only for the addressees. If you have received this message in error, please let us know and delete all copies of this message. Thank you. The author of this message is not necessarily speaking for the company. If you have concerns, please contact our main office. Any proprietary information contained in this message may not be disclosed." --- James.

On 14/08/07, James Newtons Massmind <spam_OUTjamesnewtonTakeThisOuTmassmind.org> wrote: > > > > > > This e-mail is intended for the person it is addressed to only. The > > > information contained in it may be confidential and/or protected by > > > law. If you are not the intended recipient of this message, > > you must > > > not make any use of this information, or copy or show it to any > > > person. Please contact us immediately to tell us that you have > > > received this e-mail, and return the original to us. Any use, > > > forwarding, printing or copying of this message is strictly > > prohibited. How are you supposed to return an ORIGINAL email? Especially since sending it involves copying it at least 3 times each time discarding the "original".

James Newtons Massmind wrote: >>> This e-mail is intended for the person it is addressed to only. The >>> information contained in it may be confidential and/or protected by >>> law. If you are not the intended recipient of this message, you must >>> not make any use of this information, or copy or show it to any >>> person. Please contact us immediately to tell us that you have >>> received this e-mail, and return the original to us. Any use, >>> forwarding, printing or copying of this message is strictly >>> prohibited. >> >> Is this supposed to be a parody? If only they knew that they are doing parody... they might change professions :) > Sadly, there are a number of companies who require that sort of... stuff. See also <http://goldmark.org/jeff/stupid-disclaimers/> Could possibly help someone to convince the creators that something better can be done. Gerhard

James Newtons Massmind wrote: {Quote hidden}>>> This e-mail is intended for the person it is addressed to only. The >>> information contained in it may be confidential and/or protected by >>> law. If you are not the intended recipient of this message, >> you must >>> not make any use of this information, or copy or show it to any >>> person. Please contact us immediately to tell us that you have >>> received this e-mail, and return the original to us. Any use, >>> forwarding, printing or copying of this message is strictly >> prohibited. >> >> Is this supposed to be a parody? >> >> I must not show it to ANY PERSON, but I must return it to >> you, and I can't forward it or print it, or copy it, so HOW >> was that supposed to happen? >> >> The unintended recipient shouldn't have to hire a lawyer to >> comply with such a thing. > > > Sadly, there are a number of companies who require that sort of... stuff. Sadly, they don't know that such disclaimers have ALL been thrown out in relatively low courts... as an invalid contract. Completely impossible to take any action against anyone for receiving an e-mail and reading that little "contract"... it doesn't even fall under the slimy "click-wrap" type of licensing, because no money is changing hands. Completely, utterly, worthless. Something like your corporation's lawyers since they don't know this by now. (GRIN) Case law moved on, and disclaimers on e-mail are dead, dead dead. :-) Nate

On 8/15/07, James Newtons Massmind <.....jamesnewtonKILLspam@spam@massmind.org> wrote: > I'm lucky in that I run the email server so although I am > required to add the legal text to all outgoing mail for the company, I am > not required to add it to my own personal emails: > The moral of the story is better not to use the company email address for mailing list if it has that kind of legal disclaimers which may cause irritation to some readers' eyes. Apparently it is not that stupid according to the lawyers. The only emails for my corporate account which contains this kind of disclaimers are from a outside patent lawyer. "Notice--This e-mail may contain confidential and privileged material for the sole use of the intended recipient. Any review or distribution by others is strictly prohibited. If you are not the intended recipient, please contact the sender and delete all". This looks better since it is only for the official correspondent and not for public consumption. Xiaofan

On Aug 14, 2007, at 7:23 PM, Xiaofan Chen wrote: > "Notice--This e-mail may contain confidential and privileged > material for > the sole use of the intended recipient. Any review or distribution > by others > is strictly prohibited. If you are not the intended recipient, > please contact > the sender and delete all". > > This looks better since it is only for the official correspondent > and not > for public consumption. It still doesn't work. Here's why. You can't hold me to a contract if I have no business dealings with you. If you accidentally send me something and I normally don't do any business with you at all, I can do whatever I want with the information you sent. This has already been to multiple Federal courts here, and stands pretty firmly. Of course, if I used the information you sent me for something profitable... you could still bring a nuisance lawsuit against me to TRY to enforce this, but it would either be settled out of court for a much smaller sum than we were making off of your idea (or we wouldn't have started production on it), or if your out of court offer was higher than it would cost us to pay the lawyers to take the case to trial, we'd pay the lawyers and let it play out and it would be tossed out of court, after many thousands of dollars in legal fees. Either way, you'd also have to pay those fees for the lawyers on your side, so it makes the case a difficult financial proposition for you, and not for the person who's run off with your idea. And the disclaimer on the e-mail would still be worthless. Pretty ruthless, but all the IP lawyer got you for writing up those fancy words (and think about how much he probably got paid to do that) was protection from your own customers. If you have business dealings with someone already, there's usually far better ways to deal with an information leak than to sue a customer, which never goes over well. So really, the moral of the story is... don't send e-mail to the wrong people, or you're in big trouble. No disclaimer ever written on the e-mail will save you from anyone without ethics or morals. But such busywork as creating e-mail disclaimers will keep the lawyer paid in the manner to which he's accustomed to live... probably very well, really. Find out how many billable hours and whether or not the lawyer charged the company for a golf/learning seminar on IP and a series of books on the topic, when he wrote that. I bet he charged about 20 billable hours for that little blurb at over $100/hour, and added in expenses totaling at least $3500. -- Nate Duehr nateKILLspamnatetech.com

On Aug 14, 2007, at 5:21 PM, Nate Duehr wrote: > Completely impossible to take any action against anyone for > receiving an > e-mail and reading that little "contract"... FWIW, the requests in the "contract" basically match our (and probably most non-evil companies) policies regarding reception of unsolicited confidential information concerning a competitor. Basically "the legal badness associated with doing anything with information obtained under possibly illegal circumstances far out-weighs any goodness that might arise from using the info." But of course it's rather ridiculous to see on email sent to a mass-distribution mailing list. (OTOH, code/algorithms sent to a mass-distribution mailing list have a very fuzzy status WRT using them in your product. The copyright stays with the the original author, and in the absence of an explicit license of any kind, who knows WHAT status it has.) BillW