Well, a truly incomprehensible contract WOULD be unenforceable, just
like an incomprehensible law. The new TOS agreement, however, is not
incomprehensible. It's just plain complicated.
The Lindens are obviously trying to walk a fine line between allowing
3rd Party Viewers and not being legally responsible for them. Anyone
who is shocked by that is either naive or obtuse--- or both.
--Tammy Nowotny
Kent Quirk (Q Linden) wrote:
1) The first line of my comment is that I don't speak for Linden legal.
2) What I said was that if you want to understand legalese, you should talk to
a lawyer. That's it.
Q
On Apr 1, 2010, at 4:54 AM, Gareth Nelson 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.din...@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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