Imaginary Landscape
RSS FeedContracts are an inevitable evil of doing business. Imaginary Landscape has paid tens of thousands of dollars for carefully crafted documents that are largely unintelligible.
Here’s what I want to say: “You aren’t allowed to steal our stuff.”
Here’s what it ends up looking like: “Client shall not copy, distribute, create derivative works of or modify product in any way. Client agrees that it shall use commercially reasonable efforts to prevent the unauthorized use or disclosure of product. Client further agrees not to reverse engineer, translate, disassemble, decompile or otherwise attempt to create any source code which is derived from product.”
It makes you wonder if someone ever won a court case by saying, “Look judge, I didn’t actually decompile the program – I disassembled it!”
My favorite contractual elements are the sections in ALL CAPITAL LETTERS and ALL BOLD CAPITAL LETTERS. Like somehow, that’s more important.
“Good thing the Governing Law, Venue and Jurisdiction section was in BOLD CAPS, I was just about to nod off.”
I just spent my day pouring through pages and pages of legalese, trying my best to modify an existing contract to fit a particular need, without dropping a grand or two for some paralegal to cut and paste from someone else’s legalese.
It is tremendously tedious and the end result doesn’t come close to the clarity of, “You aren’t allowed to steal our stuff.”
Updated 07/14/10 @ 11:56AM CDT by brian
Categories: Business
