Re: silly legal boilerplate, was Regarding RIM's recent IPR disclosures

[John Levine <johnl at iecc.com>]

>It is a standard footer attached automatically by many attorney's
>email systems to all outgoing mail.

Many non-attorneys' mail, too, as in this case.

Yes, it's silly: as far as I can tell, confidentiality claims like
this are entirely unenforcable in the US except in a few arcane
situations that only apply to messages from one attorney to another.
It's just another example of pseudo-legal nonsense running amok.

But I have often been sorely tempted to return messages like this with
boilerplate of my own explaining that since I cannot accept the
sender's alleged restrictions, the message has been returned unread,
and since I have no way to evaluate the sender's status relative to
the party applying the notice, disclaimers in a message saying to
ignore the boilerplate won't help.

R's,
John


>>> From: "Andrew Allen" <aallen at rim.com>
>>> To: <ietf at ietf.org>
>>> Sent: Thursday, November 19, 2009 6:11 PM
>>> Subject: Regarding RIM's recent IPR disclosures
>> ...
>>> This transmission (including any attachments) may contain confidential
>>> information, privileged material (including material protected by the
>>> solicitor-client or other applicable privileges), or constitute non-public
>>> information. Any use of this information by anyone other than the intended
>>> recipient is prohibited. If you have received this transmission in error,
>>> please immediately reply to the sender and delete this information
>>> from your system. Use, dissemination, distribution, or reproduction
>>> of this transmission by unintended recipients is not authorized and
>>> may be unlawful.
>> ...
>> 
>> This is just plain silly.  Or is it willful ignorance of the "Note Well" terms?