I Don't Know Nothing About Law, But...
Having just bought a laptop with Vista on it I was interested in how the offer of a free Windows 7 upgrade worked, so I went to look see. Now, I have no idea why, as, like most people, I never normally do, but for some reason I was reading the T&Cs Lenovo have in place. As I did I noticed this line:
Neither Lenovo nor Microsoft is not liable for any loss of data resulting from the Upgrade installation process.
Now, I'm no lawyer and legalese I do not speak, but that seems like a blatant double negative to me. Surely that leaves them wide open to liability for all sorts of issues?
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lol
Apparently there were no English major's available. If there sentence structure is like this, I wonder what their code looks like :)
Too funny!
Shame it would take a lot of time and money to put such a thing to the test. I would REALLY be tempted to give it a try otherwise.
And I'm really glad I'm not the only person to read through T&Cs. It's amazing some of the things that get put in there sometimes.
Ah, the joys of search & replace in boilerplate legal documents...
I think we should force lawyers into a dark room, and beat them around the head with sturdy bits of wood.
This won't fix the problem. It's just something I think we should do to lawyers. :-)
Now, to fix lawyers... Heh heh. "Fix lawyers". I like that. "Honey, of course you can study law. But we have to take you to the Doctor first, and get you fixed. We can't risk you Lawyers reproducing..."
Ahem. Sorry. Got sidetracked there...
Anyway, what I was going to suggest was some kind of Legal computer language to solve this problem. Something really simple, which allows you to define entities (variables) and has a few built-in values (liability, relevant laws, ownership, etc.) and enough flexibility that they can write a license or quick agreement as a bit of code.
Because then they can run the code through a compiler, and would get warnings when they screw up like this. (The compiler would generate the English text that nobody reads anyway.)
Even more importantly, the compilers could also throw up nice warnings when you're removing rights etc. - it might change boilerplate legal texts for the better!
(Well, at least until the Lawyers find ways around it.)
Lastly, require the lawers to make the code available as wella s the plain text. I'm sure consumer rights advocates would have a field day with access to that... *grins*
My guess is that there's language somewhere in there that protects both sides against what amounts to typos. I know when I bought a house, there was a clause in the contract that stated essentially that both sides were going to be reasonable in dealing with obvious errors in the contract. For example, if I accidentally signed a document that wanted me to produce a check for $10,000,000 rather than $10,000; the mortgage company wouldn't come after me for the $990,000. That kind of thing.
That's what happens when they use Babelfish to translate the licensing from the original Chinese...