"The dispute between Rogers Communications of Toronto, Canada’s largest cable television provider, and a telephone company in Atlantic Canada, Bell Aliant, is over the phone company’s attempt to cancel a contract governing Rogers’ use of telephone poles. But the argument turns on a single comma in the 14-page contract. The answer is worth 1 million Canadian dollars ($888,000).

Citing the “rules of punctuation,” Canada’s telecommunications regulator recently ruled that the comma allowed Bell Aliant to end its five-year agreement with Rogers at any time with notice."

Read more: http://www.nytimes.com/2006/10/25/business/worldbusiness/25c...

Me too. I can't remember enough about what they were to pull up details, though.

I remember it was some combination of contractual obligations to supply a certain product at a certain price, obligations to supply a certain number of them, a clause that changed the price if a certain number of them were bought, that sort of thing. You can do things like create contracts where you can buy enough of the items to trigger the lower price then force the company to take back the ones you paid the higher price for, or if you can screw with the price of some component that is necessary for the production of the thing make it so it costs the producer more to make than you're going to pay, stuff like that. Legal shenanigans? Absolutely. But considered to be normal stuff at the higher levels of the game.

Hopefully someone can come up with some better examples. But I'll at least make a peace offering with this: http://thedailywtf.com/articles/Special-Delivery