Top posting

[Christopher Browne]

On Tue, May 28, 2013 at 6:18 PM, Bob Jonkman <bjonkman-w5ExpX8uLjYAvxtiuMwx3w at public.gmane.org> wrote:

> Hugh writes:
> > It surprises me that lawyers and accountants only protect mail by a
> > silly warning at the bottom of the message.
>
> But they're lawyers. They understand the purpose of a disclaimer, and
> they have their technical means to make that an effective tool for them.
>
> Lawyers have as much affinity for encryption as we have for HTML e-mail


But they apparently fail to grasp that sometimes such disclaimers are
invalid, and that, further, the invalid uses of those disclaimers might well
undermine the legitimate ones.

The dumb thing I occasionally see on mailing lists is to see these
disclaimers put in, indiscriminately by the corporate email infrastructure,
even in cases where the nature of the participation was such that the
disclaimer was invalid by virtue of where they were participating.

That is, if you send email to a public mailing list which has always
published public archives of historical material, it is utterly illogical
to imagine that the warning is remotely valid.

What matters about this isn't my opinion or yours, but rather what
an actual judge would decide on the matter; I think it's not unlikely
for a judge to have the same "ridiculous!!!" reaction.

But if *some* of the disclaimers get invalidated as ridiculous, there
is the scary possibility that a judge reacts further, and, in effect,
says, "You fools, if you aren't competent to evaluate which of the
things you are sending out are sensitive, and hence require such
a warning, and which aren't, and so shouldn't have warnings, then
I think I have to rule that NONE of those warnings have any effect
in law."  Oops.

This has come up enough times on Postgres-related lists, and
the practice has been to jointly lightly roast those that emit
the silly disclaimers, and to suggest that they might be taking
a legal risk by watering down their traffic in that way.

It's really kind of fun to point out the way that that verbiage might
introduce a legal risk...
-- 
When confronted by a difficult problem, solve it by reducing it to the
question, "How would the Lone Ranger handle this?"
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