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

Robert Elz <kre@munnari.OZ.AU> Mon, 23 November 2009 12:21 UTC

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From: Robert Elz <kre@munnari.OZ.AU>
To: John Levine <johnl@iecc.com>
Subject: Re: silly legal boilerplate, was Regarding RIM's recent IPR disclosures
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    Date:        20 Nov 2009 05:36:18 -0000
    From:        John Levine <johnl@iecc.com>
    Message-ID:  <20091120053618.8729.qmail@simone.iecc.com>

  | 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,

That's the wrong response, it achieves nothing, the person who sent the
message usually cannot do anything about it.

A better response would be to send the stupid boilerplate (and only the
boilerplate, not the real message, or its headers) to the CEO (or corporate
lawyer, or similar) of the organisation that sent the message, along with text
something like...

	I thank an employee of your organisation for the message sent
	to me.  This note is to inform you that I do not accept, and
	will not cooperate with your organisation's non disclosure
	request (as shown herein).   If you did not intend the information
	contained in the message to become available to the public, your
	organisation should not have sent it to me.   While I respect your
	copyright of the message itself, I will use the information I
	learned from the message to my own advantage, and that of anyone
	else I feel will be able to profit from its contents.   Once again,
	thanks again for supplying me with this valuable information.

and nothing else.

kre

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