I used to think my recently strengthened Meta-Disclaimer covered everything… however, LawMeme (via Boing Boing) discusses what must surely be the largest disclaimer/user agreement on the net.
I stand in awe of, and concede all claims to comprehensiveness to, whoever wrote:
…All other access, use, disclosure, reproduction, delayed use, reduction to human-perceivable form, printing, copying or saving of digital image files or other content, reformatting, file sharing, downloading, uploading, storing, posting, mirroring, archiving, recording, distributing, redistribution, repurposing, modification, rewriting, manipulation, creation of derivative works, translations, or products, licensing, sale, transfer, display, public performance, publicity, broadcast, televising, reporting, publication (in whole or part) or transmission whether by http, ftp, electronic mail or any other file transfer protocol, and whether by electronic means or otherwise, or use by other than individual scholars, or commercial use requires prior written permission of the rights owner(s) and payment of a fee, and severe penalties apply for theft and unauthorized publication, which is also a crime.
…
You further agree to refrain from engaging in any conduct that is, or that we determine to be, in violation of this User Agreement. You acknowledge that remedies at law may be inadequate to protect against breach of our intellectual property rights, as prohibited under this Agreement, and you agree to the granting of injunctive relief without the posting of a bond or undertaking, for the protection of terms laid out in this User Agreement without proof of actual damages. You agree to undertake at your expense any measures and/or legal actions necessary to protect and defend our intellectual property by counsel reasonably accepted by us, and upon request to cooperate with us when we need to do so, and to cooperate with us as fully as reasonably required in the defense of any claim or in asserting any available defenses. We shall have the right at our sole discretion to assume the exclusive control and defense of any matter.
This astonishing document also says:
…The use fee for a license for reproduction of text is one thousandth of a U.S. dollar per word times the number of words times the number of copies, except in the case of Internet use where we generally follow the New York Times use fee schedule of one hundred dollars per article per 30 days or fraction thereof. The amount of the use fee may be adjusted by several cents in order to facilitate electronic tracking and verification of payments.
I hope that doesn’t include the disclaimer itself…
…Additionally, in the event that your actions in violation of this User Agreement result in our being deprived of our exclusive rights to ownership and control of the intellectual property we have created in this website and its digital images and/or other content in whole or substantial part, or of the value thereof, or which would make such intellectual property unsaleable, you agree to pay us liquidated damages in the amount of the greater of five million U.S. dollars, the amount of copyright infringement statutory damages per image or other content for each and every infringement, the appraised market value of this website absent such actions, and the estimated commercial cost to create a website of like complexity and content.
Now why didn’t I think of that?
And at the very end, an important point:
The author of this publication is CPRR.org, a pseudonym. The author, an individual scholar who is not a Counsellor at Law, asserts moral rights.
The deconstruction of this paragraph is left as an exercise for the student…
The scary part is: it’s not a satire. They really mean it, they really think every one of those paragraphs is necessary. That means it probably is necessary. If this goes on, in a few decades, the only way to avoid being sued for zillions of dollars will be to live in the interior of a hollowed-out asteroid at an undisclosed location and have no communication at all with the rest of the universe.
