Another solid session, this one on keeping your legal nose clean. Many thanks to Gillian Shaw, Patricia Graham and Marko Vesely (and best wishes to Jon Newton for a speedy recovery).
Posts tagged law
Can you keep a secret?
Published yesterday on ReadWriteWeb
Don’t you worry – we’ll get to the cartoon in a moment. But first, would you mind signing this standard document?
It simply says you won’t give away the joke to the cartoon. And that you won’t tell any jokes with the same punchline, or a similar punchline. Ever.
Oh, that section? That’s just boilerplate. It means you acknowledge that anything you create from this point forward is a derivative work of this cartoon, and is therefore our property. Purely standard wording.
Um, yes, that next passage would appear, on the surface, to obligate you to buy a set of encyclopedias and four Magic Bullet food processors. Here, let’s just strike that out.
Look, can I level with you? Somewhere along the line, our lawyers… well, they went kind of… well, you don’t want to say “crazy”, because that’s potentially actionable. Let’s say “overzealous.”
Once they finished drafting contracts and handling the incorporation, I think they had some time on their hands. And they started thinking of ways to fill it.
Suddenly, we had to sign a liability waiver to use the coffee machine. You couldn’t use the photocopier without a notarized affidavit that you weren’t violating anyone’s IP. I found Terms of Use agreements posted above the urinals in the men’s room.
Look, you seem like a decent enough person. And the cartoon’s Creative Commons-licensed anyway. So go ahead and read it – knock yourself out.
Um, although in case you do knock yourself out, I’m going to need you to sign this waiver…
Dial ‘M’ for ‘My God, You’re All Over the Road’
I live in a place where they’ve recently banned the use of mobile phones while driving, with additional penalties for texting. And I have a lot of company: Six U.S. states have prohibited handheld mobile use by drivers, and 20 won’t be happy with you if you SMS from behind the wheel.
(It’s having an impact. I’m noticing a sharp reduction in “Totally just ran someone over” tweets from friends.)
While the focus is on safety, and rightly so, I do wonder if there might be another benefit: inspiring more people to leave the car at home and take transit. Don’t laugh (well, not until you get to the cartoon, at which point I’d kind of appreciate it if you would). A lot of us treat mobile connectivity as a compulsion, and the enforced hour-long severing from the hive mind for twice-a-day commutes is a genuine pain point. And the growing strength of everything from location-aware apps to augmented reality will only sharpen it.
For car drivers, the freedom of the open road, as illusory as it has been for decades, is about to get more so. Mass transit may at times be crowded and uncomfortable, but with the escape to cyberspace just a few keystrokes away, buses and trains may well eclipse the car as the homes of true mobile freedom.
Force me to choose between my mobile phone and my car, and I’ll do my best to hang onto the phone. Your mileage, of course, may vary; what choice will you make?
