[opensource-dev] Can you legally agree to incomprehensible conditions?

Jonathan Irvin djfoxyslpr at gmail.com
Thu Apr 1 04:13:36 PDT 2010


Keep in mind, most of this "legalese" that they have is just to cover their
own asses.  Many MANY companies do stuff like this just in case that if
something ever escalates to a point where those words come to play in court,
they have all their P's and Q's.

Linden Labs is a company, folks...a company that has a budget, a
bottom-line, and most of all liable assets in which they need to protect in
order to keep themselves afloat and give us all something to rant about (
I'm just kidding :P ).

An age-old question comes to mind...

"How many programmers does it take to change a lightbulb?"

Answer One, Zero, we don't have the source code for it.
Answer Two, Zero, it's a hardware issue.

Jonathan Irvin


On Thu, Apr 1, 2010 at 03:54, Gareth Nelson <gareth at garethnelson.com> wrote:

> An interesting point:
> If a member of staff at LL is basically saying "none of you can
> comprehend this policy", then that surely means none of us can
> actually consent to agree to it.
>
> Q - you may have just provided some "fuel" for use in any future court case
>
> On Thu, Apr 1, 2010 at 8:42 AM, Morgaine <morgaine.dinova at googlemail.com>
> wrote:
> > On 21st March, Q Linden explained to us that legalese is not a language
> > amenable to "common sense" interpretation, and more specifically, that
> > programmers like ourselves should not expect to understand this Linden
> TPV
> > policy document using our normal logic and our normal dictionary.  I'll
> > repeat his words here for clarity:
> >
> >
> >     Kent Quirk (Q Linden) q at lindenlab.com
> >     Sun Mar 21 10:24:13 PDT 2010
> >
> > I'm emphatically not a lawyer and I don't speak for our legal team. But:
> >
> > Legalese is a specialized language. It's not strictly English, and it's
> not
> > always amenable to "common sense" interpretation. Think of lawyers as
> people
> > who write code in an underspecified language for a buggy compiler, and
> you
> > begin to understand why legalese is the way it is. There's a lot of law
> that
> > isn't stated, but is actually implied by the context of the existing
> settled
> > law. What that means is that if you're not a lawyer, you probably
> shouldn't
> > be attempting to interpret legal documents -- especially not for other
> > people. Similarly, if you're not a programmer, attempting to interpret
> > program source code is a risky business. Programmers are especially
> > susceptible to trying to interpret legal documents using a normal
> dictionary
> > because they're logical thinkers. That doesn't always work. If you have
> > legal questions about the implication of documents, you should ask a
> lawyer,
> > not a mailing list.
> >
> > Similarly, any comment by one of Linden's lawyers in this forum or any
> other
> > could possibly be treated as legally binding. That also goes for Linden
> > employees, especially those with any seniority. So you're unlikely to get
> > further remarks or "clarifications", except general statements that don't
> > address specific questions. The policy was revised based on comments on
> this
> > list and elsewhere. That's probably a pretty good indication that Linden
> > Lab's lawyers now think it's clear enough to state its intent and to
> stand
> > up in court if they need it to.
> >
> > Q
> >
> >
> > I've been thinking about this extraordinary post and its relationship to
> our
> > ongoing saga about the TPV, and I fail to see how any rational person
> could
> > agree to something unknown, except under duress.  Is it even legal to be
> > required to agree to the incomprehensible?  Does anyone know how the law
> > works in this area?
> >
> > The GPL license was written by FSF lawyers specifically to be understood
> by
> > programmers, so it's no surprise that the large majority of people here
> > understand it. Given that Lindens claim that they are issuing a valid GPL
> > license, perhaps one might accept that at face value, and assume that
> GPLv2
> > clauses 6, 7, 11 and 12 remain intact and valid.  Therefore there are no
> > "further restrictions" imposed on SL TPV developers (clause 6), and the
> "NO
> > WARRANTY" clause (11-12) continues to protect developers from downstream
> > liability, and no "conditions are imposed on you that contradict the
> > conditions of this License" thus making the license valid (clause 7).
> >
> > Given the forgoing, the officially incomprehensible TPV document then no
> > longer matters to SL TPV developers, because their rights and freedoms
> and
> > lack of liability are determined entirely by the GPL.  (It could be no
> other
> > way anyway, since we are told that we cannot understand the TPV.)
> >
> > That leaves only the matter of users of TPVs behaving responsibly when
> they
> > use TPV clients in SL, with which I'm sure every person on this list is
> > happy to agree.  (Note that developers become users when they connect to
> SL,
> > and are bound by the same requirements as users.)  When users do
> something
> > bad with a TPV client, or indeed with a Linden client, then naturally
> they
> > are personally responsible for their actions.
> >
> > In the absence of a TPV document that we can comprehend, perhaps this is
> the
> > best that TPV developers can do, since agreeing to incomprehensible
> > conditions is not something that any sensible person should consider.
> >
> >
> > Morgaine.
> >
> >
> >
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>
>
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