Today slashdot had a link to
Chuck Jones’ web page. I visited the page and
found the following copyright notice at the bottom:
The information on this site is Copyright 1996-2004 Linda Jones Enterprises, Inc. This site is solely for your personal use. You may link to these pages or print them out for your own personal use, but no parts of these pages can be reproduced, sold, or transmitted in any form without explicit written permission. By copying or paraphrasing the intellectual property on this page, you’re automatically signing a binding contract and agreeing to be billed $10,000 payable immediately
This seed a little like boilerplate text that might appear on other web sites. A
little googling reveled that
Professor Jam has almost the same
exact text:
Professor Jam the individual, the
Space Jam System, Blue CD are registered trademarks of
Mr. Rader. 1996- 2002 Professor Jam/Space Jam System
P.O. Box 188
Elfers, Florida USA 34680-0188
ALL images that are viewed on this site
are creative creations and licensed to Professor Jam. they may
not be duplicated in any way without prior written permission.
You may link to these pages or print them out for your own personal
use, but no parts of these pages can be reproduced, sold, or
transmitted in any form without our explicit written permission.
By copying or paraphrasing the intellectual property on this page,
you’re automatically entering into a binding contract and agreeing
to be billed $7,000 payable immediately.
I remember seeing a lot more TOSs like these back in the early days of the Internet,
back before people understood what fair use was. Basically, you can’t just say someone
agrees to something. They need to sign away anything beyond just fair use. For
example, at a baseball game, I don’t have the normal fair use rights, but that’s
because I agree to those terms when I enter the stadium (read the back of a ticket).
Albeit, even that really hasn’t been challenged. In any case, they can’t take away
the right to paraphrase or to discuss in a public forum. Silly non-Internet-literate
people.
Updated 2004-05-30: Removed some of the copyright and all rights
reserved symbols because they were UTF-8 (or something like that) and causing
the XSLT processor to die for people who use crappy browsers.
