Contracts

[nemorathwald]

I am amused. Recently someone had their signifigant other write up a contract for me to sign. He then took that contract back because it was written in plain English, and re-wrote it himself. He seems to think inscrutable legalese and covering your behind with contracts is required to be professionalistic.* I regard it as unneccesary; if for any reason he someday said "hey, it's not working for me anymore and we're done," we're just done. It's not like a contract would change that. I'm not offended or threatened, but and am going along with it in good humor. The person I mentioned is a fine fellow and I know he isn't lawyering himself up, of course. 

Where it comes to contracts, I see a distinction between the world of free digital content (webcomics, podcasts, free stories, etc) and the rest of the business world. 

What you do in this realm is ask the other person nicely to stop doing something bad. If they don't stop, you tell your own audience that they did something bad to you. You have to have the good will of a fan base, who are your donors. Joss Whedon said "they used to say this is show business, not show friends. Now it's show friends." Contracts are between lawyers, gentleperson handshake agreements are between folks who need to keep their fan base. Which one of those do you think entertainment Big Business picks? They're the industry that's suing their own fans for breach of an unwritten, unsigned social contract. 

If it ever got to the highly unlikely point where this contract was worth anything, in other words with lawyers and courts involved, all of us would already be screwed beyond all recovery. Free digital content is not the type of "business" that has money to spend on legal teams, or that has money signifigant enough for other digital content providers to be worth taking from them using another legal team. They say "business is war", but in the free content realm, you can't really go to war. So there's not much point to set up on a hostile or non-trusting footing.

But still, I'm happy to help people feel professionalistic, because that makes them feel good.

* That reminds me of the conversation I had with netmouse in which I used the word "professionalistic" and she asked why I don't just say "professional". I told her I use "professionalistic" when I mean projecting the image of being a pro. I reserve the term "professional" for substance.

Comments

[aiela.livejournal.com]

ONe of the things we learned in my contract law class was to USE PLAIN ENGLISH, and that legalese is pointless and just confuses the client.

[tlatoani.livejournal.com]

Worse: when lay people use legalese to sound more "official," they're using terms of art which they probably don't fully understand. A court will interpret a contract written in plain English the same way normal people would -- but if you write it in legal terminology, it will interpret it the way a lawyer with a copy of Black's Law Dictionary would. You might not be saying what you think you are...

[(Anonymous)]

Speaking of contracts, check out the EULA for the Illegal Art website:

http://www.illegal-art.org/contract.html

It's the best EULA I've ever read. :)

-- Bruce