[Sussex] Rediculous email sigs...

[Geoff Teale]

Jon wrote:
------------
> Doesn't that then mean:
>
> 1) I have full copyright of all emails Gareth sends, as I've opened the
> email and have to accept *all* responsibility?
>
> 2) Hypothetically speaking, Gareth sends me an email threatening to kill
> a close friend of mine. Close friend gets killed. Police find email.
> Police notice I have all responsibility for what was written in the email.
> Police put two and two together and make 5. I do porridge for 20 years.

:)

Nice take on things... unfortunately, what this is meant to imply is that you 
are responsible fot working whether it is safe to open Gareths e-mails.  

.. of course the law isn't as black and white as that, and I think any such 
license would be invalidated by the fact that you didn't have the chance to 
view (and thus understand) the license before you agreed to it (because 
readin the e-mail is acceptance as defined in that text).

Caveat Emptor: 
============
As Nik rightly points out the law comes in many forms:

What the man on the street believes (which is usually utterly wrong, but 
mostly irrelevant - the most common one I hear is the constant reliance on 
the "Trades Descriptions Act").

The pseudo lawyers opinion (a little knowledge can be a dangerous thing).  So 
people like me, who have recieved some legal training but are not qualified 
lawyers (luckily I have a handy lawyer in the house to put me straight when I 
start talking out of my arse, every home should have one ;) ).

The actual lawyers opinion.  Usually a guarded and non-comital, "don't get 
your hopes up".  The other thig to note here is that lawyers are generally 
specialists (the only generalists are small high-street lawyers, and mostly 
they aren't very good), asking a conveyancing specialist about an 
intellectual property issue is akin to asking a dreamweaver-web-monkey for 
their opinon on the relative merits of XFS and JFS for the handling of media 
files in excess of 500MB.

Reality - the application of the law in a given case at any level of the court 
system and the results of the application.


-- 
GJT
Free Software Foundation
tealeg at member.fsf.org