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Re: Confidentiality disclaimers, was: GoDaddy DDoS

  • From: Valdis.Kletnieks
  • Date: Thu Dec 01 12:18:16 2005

On Thu, 01 Dec 2005 01:47:17 PST, Jay Hennigan said:

> Has the validity of such language ever been upheld in court?

IANAL - but apparently the use of it on *some* faxes has stood up in court,
it hasn't been tested on e-mail yet, but a number of people who have written
on it think that the indiscriminate use of disclaimers will backfire badly
if the opposing legal staff can show the company can't tell the difference
between an e-mail discussing strategy for an upcoming trial and a request
for help with BGP. URLs I found the last time I researched this:

http://www.wendytech.com/articlesemailandprivilege.htm
http://www.mcguirewoods.com/news-resources/publications/commercial_litigation/LitigationEthics.Brief.33.2.Winter2004.pdf
http://partners.nytimes.com/library/tech/00/03/cyber/cyberlaw/17law.html

> Nobody reads it anyway.  You're not actually reading this, are you?
> I didn't think so.

I love the ones that put "please discard without reading" at the *bottom* of
the e-mail.  Bonus points for having a single unwrapped 3,487 character long
line so standard-compliant MUAs that don't flow text unless it *says* text/flowed,
so you have to use the horizontal scrollbar to find the "please discard without
reading" ;)

ObNANOG: The ones that claim you are *required* to destroy *all* copies,
including the unlinked-but-not-yet-overwritten data blocks on that RAID
you use for a mail store, and the backup tapes.  I mean, after all, if they
screwed up and they want it *destroyed*, they don't want it *destroyed* in the
half-assed, just-get-the-disk-copy way that eventually helped convict
Colonel Oliver North partly on the basis of the backup tapes:

http://www.fas.org/spp/starwars/offdocs/reagan/chron.txt

Figuring out how to do this right, and then invoice the responsible company for the
cost, thus creating a profit center for your company, is left as an excersize
for the reader. ;)

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