Installfest thoughts

[Marcus Brubaker]

[Sent at the start of the TLUG list blackout, resending now.]

Christopher Browne wrote:

>My reaction to this is "Isn't there a risk of legal paralysis in this
>
>paranoia???"
>
>Putting myself in the shoes of an outsider for a moment, if I saw a
>"slickly-lawyerly-worded form," I would wonder why a bunch of
>"computer hackers" felt the activity to be SO risky that they consider
>it vital to so conspicuously and *precisely legally* disclaim
>responsibility.
>
>It would definitely leave me suspicious, and more than a little
>disinclined to sign off.
>
>Taking off those shoes again, I certainly don't object to the notion
>of having a lawyer look at release forms, but if it NEEDS to lead to a
>whole diarrhea of legal verbiage, I start to wonder if this doesn't
>mean that running an InstallFest is a "supremely legally risky"
>endeavour that perhaps we need to steer clear of.
>
>That is, if avoiding legal entanglements in some given activity makes
>it mandatory to have a frightening, unreadable set of technical legal
>disclaimers, perhaps the activity has become one which Legal Dangers
>has essentially rendered into a state where we can't do it.
>
>Shall I reword that a third time?  If putting on an InstallFest is
>*so* unsafe, legally speaking, that we need for participants to sign
>off on fairly intense legal contracts, doesn't that suggest that an
>InstallFest is too risky (from a legal perspective) for a volunteer
>organization to run?
>  
>
I'm not sure that installfests are that unsafe legally speaking but that
society as a whole is that litigous.  Putting on an event for the
general public means that the people at the installfest are going to be
interacting with strangers who may or may not fully understand the
nature of what they are having done to their computer.  Add to the mix
that, for many people, their computer contains a large amount of
sensitve and important documents and we come to a situation where people
have a lot to loose if things go south.  It only takes one lawsuit to
ruin a persons financial future and I don't think anyone wants to risk
that by volunteering.  This means we need to have release forms and,
frankly, a release form that isn't legally sound isn't worth the paper
its written on.

Regards,
Marcus

--
The Toronto Linux Users Group.      Meetings: http://tlug.ss.org
TLUG requests: Linux topics, No HTML, wrap text below 80 columns
How to UNSUBSCRIBE: http://tlug.ss.org/subscribe.shtml