Tim Danner

In my opinion, this pretty much has to be a spoof of outrageous legalese. It seems to have been taken seriously by Yale Law’s LawMeme website though.

For starters, it’s incredibly long (21,000 words), and it goes completely overboard on listing synonyms - like this:

All other access, use, disclosure, reproduction, delayed use, reduction to human-perceivable form, printing, copying or saving of digital image files or other content, reformatting, file sharing, downloading, uploading, storing, posting, mirroring, archiving, recording, distributing, redistribution, repurposing, modification, rewriting, manipulation, creation of derivative works, translations, or products, licensing, sale, transfer, display, public performance, publicity, broadcast, televising, reporting, publication (in whole or part) or transmission whether by http, ftp, electronic mail or any other file transfer protocol, and whether by electronic means or otherwise, or use by other than individual scholars, or commercial use requires prior written permission of the rights owner(s) and payment of a fee, and severe penalties apply for theft and unauthorized publication, which is also a crime.

But I think my favorite paragraph (I didn’t read the whole thing - this was highlighted on the LawMeme story) is this one:

Please read this Legal Notice of Infringement which applies to you only if you have violated this User Agreement, or made any use of this website in any way not specifically authorized and permitted herein, in which case you acknowledge timely receipt hereof, which you agree is sufficient notice, at such time as you commenced violation of this User Agreement.

To save time, they included the notice of infringement in the agreement! As soon as you violate the agreement, you are to consider yourself served. And you hereby agree that this constitutes “timely receipt”! Hah!

This entry was posted on Friday, February 6th, 2004 at 9:05 am and is filed under Humor. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.