E-Mail Disclosure Agreements? 10
sloondogger asks: "I got an e-mail from a customer the other day that included this at the end of what was a clueless and annoying attempt to communicate anyway:
'This e-mail and any attachments are confidential and may contain
commercially sensitive information and/or copyright material of
Southern Ocean Systems Pty Ltd or third parties. You should only
re-transmit or distribute the material if you are authorised to
do so. This notice should not be removed.' I don't believe that there is anything that is legally binding to this statement. I, of course, removed it when I replied. I thought it would be interesting to find out if these do have any sort of legal power at all or if they are just annoying wastes of bandwidth." Does such an agreement have any more weight now that electronic signatures have passed?
umm (Score:1)
mail-order pharmacies have similar notices (Score:1)
It appears at the bottom of the message (at the top would of course be better).
As another poster wrote, using PGP would make more sense.
Not Legally Bound, IMO (Score:1)
If you don't accept it, you're not bound.
confidentiality of email (Score:1)
Supposedly they're directors of a Petrochemical company there, and have an overflow in a payment to a foreign contractor, and want to steal it for themselves. The other one was similar, with different situation, and different people, but still in Nigeria.
Either way, both said this was strictly confidential, and for the owner of the company only. So maybe they should have sent it to him, instead of me, the sysadmin.
Re:Hrm (Score:1)
Re:confidentiality of email (Score:1)
Haiku (Score:1)
Tangible medium, standard boilerplate,... (Score:2)
Anyway, something that Law 101 For Programmers should cover is that anything on your disk is "reduced to tangible form." On the one hand, that means that it's covered by copyright law. On the other hand, that means that you have to take more care with it than with, oh, a snippet of conversation overheard in a public bathroom.
Furthermore, there are a *lot* of places where this type of statement makes sense -- so much sense that failure to include it could give the sender a lot of grief. E.g., if I'm negotiating to sell something, someone at the other site lets the details of my offer out, and that information subsequently costs me a far larger sale because my competitor is able to underbid me.
Because of the latter concerns, what you saw was probably attached to *all* outbound mail automatically - at the same point a copy is made for future reference.
And if it's a Nigerian (or any other) scam, it should be forwarded to the appropriate authorities. That Nigerian scam has been bloody - some people actually traveled to Nigeria where they were kidnapped and/or killed.
(P.S., IANAL, but one of my graduate software engineering classes had a section on legal issues, and a visiting lecture by a local practicing lawyer.)
Re:confidentiality of email (Score:1)
Blanket Use of Confidentiality Notice (Score:2)