Re: Extraneous "legal" babble--and my reaction to it.
On 9/8/2015 03:31, Rich Kulawiec wrote:
On Sun, Sep 06, 2015 at 09:14:02PM +0000, Connor Wilkins wrote:
Honestly.. the best method is to not let it bug you anymore. It's only a seething issue to you because you let it be.
Curiously enough, the same thing was said about spam 30-ish years ago. The "ignore it and maybe it will go away" approach did not yield satisfactory results.
These "disclaimers" are stupid and abusive. They have no place in *any* email traffic, and most certainly not in a professional forum. And it is unreasonable to expect the recipients of the demands and threats they embody to silently tolerate them ad infinitum.
Exactly so. JHD -- sed quis custodiet ipsos custodes? (Juvenal)
I am trying to understand why the legal babble bothers anyone. Does it give you a nervous twitch? Remind you why you hate legal? It's just text at the bottom of your email. Regards, Dovid -----Original Message----- From: Larry Sheldon <larrysheldon@cox.net> Sender: "NANOG" <nanog-bounces@nanog.org>Date: Tue, 8 Sep 2015 03:56:30 To: <nanog@nanog.org> Subject: Re: Extraneous "legal" babble--and my reaction to it. On 9/8/2015 03:31, Rich Kulawiec wrote:
On Sun, Sep 06, 2015 at 09:14:02PM +0000, Connor Wilkins wrote:
Honestly.. the best method is to not let it bug you anymore. It's only a seething issue to you because you let it be.
Curiously enough, the same thing was said about spam 30-ish years ago. The "ignore it and maybe it will go away" approach did not yield satisfactory results.
These "disclaimers" are stupid and abusive. They have no place in *any* email traffic, and most certainly not in a professional forum. And it is unreasonable to expect the recipients of the demands and threats they embody to silently tolerate them ad infinitum.
Exactly so. JHD -- sed quis custodiet ipsos custodes? (Juvenal)
On Wed, 09 Sep 2015 13:36:39 -0000, "Dovid Bender" said:
I am trying to understand why the legal babble bothers anyone. Does it give you a nervous twitch? Remind you why you hate legal? It's just text at the bottom of your email.
Disclaimers like those are like brown M&M's backstage at a Van Halen concert. If you see one of those on mail sent to a public mailing list, it's a sure sign that there's other, much more serious issues. Because let's face it, they're an admission that the offending company hasn't gotten a *real* data confidentiality program in place, and the amount of attempted adhesion in them indicates that the legal people asking for it may not be all that competent either....
It's just text at the bottom of your email.
1 often a very large amount of text - in this case the legalese was something like 10x longer than the comment! 2 its pointless. Its not enforceable and doesn't mean anything. Shall i put a chapter of war and peace at the end of my emails? You could just ignore it..... ;) alan
I would. Once I see legal stuff I know to stop reading. It does not hurt anyone. Not sure why this hurts so much. Some things will remain a mystery. Regards, Dovid -----Original Message----- From: Alan Buxey <A.L.M.Buxey@lboro.ac.uk> Date: Wed, 9 Sep 2015 16:23:01 To: <dovid@telecurve.com>; Larry Sheldon<larrysheldon@cox.net>; NANOG<nanog-bounces@nanog.org>; <nanog@nanog.org> Subject: Re: Extraneous "legal" babble--and my reaction to it.
It's just text at the bottom of your email.
1 often a very large amount of text - in this case the legalese was something like 10x longer than the comment! 2 its pointless. Its not enforceable and doesn't mean anything. Shall i put a chapter of war and peace at the end of my emails? You could just ignore it..... ;) alan
Dovid Bender wrote:
I would. Once I see legal stuff I know to stop reading. It does not hurt anyone. Not sure why this hurts so much. Some things will remain a mystery.
No mystery ... It wastes bits that could otherwise be used to watch cat videos. ;) Tony
I love cat videos. On Wed, Sep 9, 2015 at 12:13 PM, Tony Hain <alh-ietf@tndh.net> wrote:
Dovid Bender wrote:
I would. Once I see legal stuff I know to stop reading. It does not hurt anyone. Not sure why this hurts so much. Some things will remain a mystery.
No mystery ... It wastes bits that could otherwise be used to watch cat videos. ;)
Tony
-- :o@>
In article <1515735780-1441805800-cardhu_decombobulator_blackberry.rim.net-1712088326-@b13.c3.bise6.blackberry> you write:
I am trying to understand why the legal babble bothers anyone. Does it give you a nervous twitch? Remind you why you hate legal? It's just text at the bottom of your email.
Indeed, but it's text that says something between "I am stupid" and "my life is controlled by people who are stupid." Generally speaking, many of us would prefer less stupid. Regards, John Levine, johnl@iecc.com, Primary Perpetrator of "The Internet for Dummies", Please consider the environment before reading this e-mail. http://jl.ly
On 09/09/2015 06:36 AM, Dovid Bender wrote:
I am trying to understand why the legal babble bothers anyone. Does it give you a nervous twitch? Remind you why you hate legal? It's just text at the bottom of your email.
It's all about best practices. In an e-mail thread, where the thread grows with each response, the original e-mail etiquette is that people put their reply at the bottom of the message. The theory behind the practice is that when you are going back to read the message later, you can read it top-down and get the contributions in chronological order. (And only save the last one, instead of all of them.) If you have a huge disclaimer in your sig, when the reader goes to the bottom of the e-mail to read the latest contribution, they have to back up over the over-large signature block. This is irritating. For some readers using non-graphical e-mail clients or Web clients, that irritation can grow to the point that the message gets tossed. That's why the Best Practices RFC said to have no more than three lines in your .sig of at most 71 characters each. With AOL and "Forever September", some of these things get lost in the waves and waves of non-compliance, not because people don't want to be good citizens, but because they don't know better. And, if you aren't keeping the entire thread (such as what I'm doing here), you trim quotes to the absolute minimum to maintain context, so that people don't have to wade through the whole mess. It also avoids top-posting, which in some circles is Bad Form(tm). By the way, it's never been about cat videos...
On 09/09/2015 06:36 AM, Dovid Bender wrote:
I am trying to understand why the legal babble bothers anyone. Does it give you a nervous twitch? Remind you why you hate legal? It's just text at the bottom of your email.
Here's the thing... If your employer insists on attaching a legalistic signature to your email which warns the recipient that the message is for their eyes only... it's because you are not authorized to make public statements as an employee of the company. So please respect that limitation and make your _public_ posts to NANOG without using your work email address. 'Cause if you don't respect us enough not to flood us with wacky legal documents and you don't respect your employer enough to obey their rules, why should we respect anything else you have to say? Make sense? Regards, Bill Herrin -- William Herrin ................ herrin@dirtside.com bill@herrin.us Owner, Dirtside Systems ......... Web: <http://www.dirtside.com/>
If your employer insists on attaching a legalistic signature to your email which warns the recipient that the message is for their eyes only... it's because you are not authorized to make public statements as an employee of the company.
No, that's not it. A disclaimer "I don't speak for foocorp" is not at all the same as "you have to keep this super sekrit foocorp message confidential." The disclaimers tend to be much shorter and are somewhat reasonable, stating that this message does *not* constitute a contract. As explained at length, the confidentiality stuff purports to be a contract but is not. As I said it can be summarized as "I am stupid" or "I am controlled by stupid." Regards, John Levine, johnl@iecc.com, Primary Perpetrator of "The Internet for Dummies", Please consider the environment before reading this e-mail. http://jl.ly
In my case, I resent the idea that some lawyer somewhere thought I could somehow be bound to an agreement I never agreed to which does not appear to me until I have reached the end of an email on which he/she feels I should be bound. It’s an absurd construct. It’s a waste of bits that could be used for good purpose such as discussing why we all dislike lawyers so much. It’s a display of arrogance and it’s presumptuous. In short, it’s an offensive behavior. The fact that it is a corporate policy only makes it more offensive. Owen
On Sep 9, 2015, at 06:36 , Dovid Bender <dovid@telecurve.com> wrote:
I am trying to understand why the legal babble bothers anyone. Does it give you a nervous twitch? Remind you why you hate legal? It's just text at the bottom of your email.
Regards,
Dovid
-----Original Message----- From: Larry Sheldon <larrysheldon@cox.net> Sender: "NANOG" <nanog-bounces@nanog.org>Date: Tue, 8 Sep 2015 03:56:30 To: <nanog@nanog.org> Subject: Re: Extraneous "legal" babble--and my reaction to it.
On 9/8/2015 03:31, Rich Kulawiec wrote:
On Sun, Sep 06, 2015 at 09:14:02PM +0000, Connor Wilkins wrote:
Honestly.. the best method is to not let it bug you anymore. It's only a seething issue to you because you let it be.
Curiously enough, the same thing was said about spam 30-ish years ago. The "ignore it and maybe it will go away" approach did not yield satisfactory results.
These "disclaimers" are stupid and abusive. They have no place in *any* email traffic, and most certainly not in a professional forum. And it is unreasonable to expect the recipients of the demands and threats they embody to silently tolerate them ad infinitum.
Exactly so. JHD
-- sed quis custodiet ipsos custodes? (Juvenal)
On 09/09/15 06:36, Dovid Bender wrote:
I am trying to understand why the legal babble bothers anyone. Does it give you a nervous twitch? Remind you why you hate legal? It's just text at the bottom of your email.
I've seen it in multiple languages (not necessarily on this list). Furthermore, some mailing lists support HTML and when they send it in HTML it sends two copies. Some others even add a corporate image (sometimes mistakenly huge, sometimes small) to their signature. People do this a lot. If everybody did the same for all messages it would be a huge waste of bandwidth. For servers, because it's 1 byte times N subscriptions. For readers, because people should be able to read this in their mobile devices. For some this means access charges by byte. That's why it's frowned upon in mosts mailing lists and just directly forbidden in others. This is not new at all. Just my two cents. Best regards.
On Wed, 9 Sep 2015, Dovid Bender wrote:
I am trying to understand why the legal babble bothers anyone. Does it give you a nervous twitch? Remind you why you hate legal? It's just text at the bottom of your email.
I can see both sides of this: 1. People who post to this list from a work email address often have no control over what their employer appends to the end of their outgoing emails. The footers in question are usually added after the fact because someone in a position of authority at $employer says it needs to be there. 2. A half-page of legalese boilerplate following a one-line message on a mailing list that goes out to many thousands of people can be a bit irritating. The compromise would seem to be to use a third-party email account for subscribing to mailing lists, but there could be environments where that doesn't fly with those same people in positions of authority... jms
-----Original Message----- From: Larry Sheldon <larrysheldon@cox.net> Sender: "NANOG" <nanog-bounces@nanog.org>Date: Tue, 8 Sep 2015 03:56:30 To: <nanog@nanog.org> Subject: Re: Extraneous "legal" babble--and my reaction to it.
On 9/8/2015 03:31, Rich Kulawiec wrote:
On Sun, Sep 06, 2015 at 09:14:02PM +0000, Connor Wilkins wrote:
Honestly.. the best method is to not let it bug you anymore. It's only a seething issue to you because you let it be.
Curiously enough, the same thing was said about spam 30-ish years ago. The "ignore it and maybe it will go away" approach did not yield satisfactory results.
These "disclaimers" are stupid and abusive. They have no place in *any* email traffic, and most certainly not in a professional forum. And it is unreasonable to expect the recipients of the demands and threats they embody to silently tolerate them ad infinitum.
Exactly so. JHD
-- sed quis custodiet ipsos custodes? (Juvenal)
participants (12)
-
Alan Buxey -
Dovid Bender -
John Levine -
Justin M. Streiner -
Larry Sheldon -
Octavio Alvarez -
Oliver O'Boyle -
Owen DeLong -
Stephen Satchell -
Tony Hain -
Valdis.Kletnieks＠vt.edu -
William Herrin