Re: sprank

[David Bateman]

Judd Storrs wrote:
> On Sat, Apr 10, 2010 at 2:29 PM, David Bateman <address@hidden> wrote:
>   
> > Unfortunately some companies legal policy require such guff, so please note
> > that by doing such a thing you're probably punishing the victim
> >     
>
> Am I expected to submit these things to my employer's legal council
> before replying? Isn't that punishing the receiver, too? The legal
> boilerplate in the original message is 80% of the text. I guess one
> could take the probably risky approach of just ignoring them. I am not
> a lawyer and I have no idea how Israeli law about defense contractors
> works or interacts with local/state/national/international laws where
> I live. That's why I asked him to clarify if I'm allowed to send a
> reply to the content of the message. I figure the legal boilerplate
> isn't part of the content, so asking about the boilerplate should be
> ok. Then again maybe I'm wrong. Companies aren't going to change their
> policies if they don't get feedback.
>   
I used to be obliged to have a a footer that said if a message was 
confidential or not, but thankfully no longer have to. The reasoning was 
simple. NDAs and contracts that we signed had clauses in them that 
information we communicated to a partner had to be clearly marked as 
confidential if the confidentiality clauses of the contract or NDA were 
to be respected. The language in this boilerplate seems to be a cut and 
paste from a standard template NDA, and dissemination would mean to 
someone else than those that already had access to the information. The 
bolierplate looses its sense when sent to a publically archived mailing 
list as the information contained in the mail is no longer confidential 
in anyway. With out an NDA between me and RAFAEL such a contractual 
clause can't be imposed on me in such an arbitrary manner. either I have 
no fear or legal reprisal in responding in such a case.

He's still a victim though as it looks to me that this boilerplate was 
added by the outgoing mail server.. You should be attacking his sysadmin 
and there management for being so stupid about the manner in which they 
treat confidentiality. I doubt an individual employee would have any 
chance of getting a company to be less stupid about the boilerplate, 
though so if you can't respond for whatever reason to a mail with a 
footer like this the best thing to do is probably ignore it.

D.