I think you underestimate how well anyone in management actually understands this. One job had me constantly pushing back on three or more paragraphs of legal text in the damndest of places. In one case, the legal text was larger than the form itself to say "we need your email to contact you with changes related to your account".
Every time I contacted our company lawyer directly for clarification, he was always fine with the short summaries I wrote.
I was the only person in the entire process that stopped to ask if any of this was really necessary. I guess that's why I was the developer handling all most of our legal compliance. Everyone else either didn't care or had given up.
"As the writer, I get as much monetary value as I can or at least make you believe as such and you give up as much monetary value as possible, or at least as much as I can scare or deter you from seeking. I also have no responsibilities and all rights, while you have all responsibilities and no rights."
It's simply expanded out a bit more and often gives explicit examples. It's completely unmanageable for any common citizen to process and understand what you almost have to agree to on daily basis to function in our ever more privatized world.
The amount of garbage I see on a daily basis wrapped with passive aggressive legal threats around every corner is mind numbing. I even still get emails from people who add footers that they own the information and if you receive it wrongfully, you're "required" to delete it.
We essentially have a bunch of children running around running society through businesses driven by greed who never fully socially developed into functioning reasonable and responsible adults.
The company can now sue the recipient or at least threaten him for disclosing stuff. Yes: the error is on the sender side, but in ye olde times the unspoken agreement was that you'd delete mails not addressed to you. Times have changed and so the legal boilerplate had to adapt.
A bit more common sense across the world, especially when it comes to the trend of resolving conflicts via courts instead of talking to one another and shaking hands, and there would be a lot less boilerplate and mind-bogglingly dumb disclaimers ("don't put any animals in microwaves") in this world.
I'm skeptical.
If the language doesn't actually prevent liability anyway, then get rid of it.
In ye olden days if you accidentally received someone else's mail it was a felony to open it. If anything the legal restrictions have been drastically reduced when it comes to email.
https://thelawdictionary.org/article/what-is-the-federal-law...
GP said that the letter is addressed to you, but the content is intended for someone else. You can’t obstruct delivery because it’s been delivered to the right place (the address on the envelope).
If obstruction of delivery applied in this case then we would end up with the ludicrous scenario where I could deliberately address letters to you, that are intended for my boss, then demand that you somehow deliver or return the letters once you’ve opened them.
Imagine if I sent you thousands of these letters, it would be a postal and legal DDOS.
I imagine if you tried to abuse this and then sue your case would be laughed out of court. It would also be awfully expensive; compare the cost of postage to send all those letters with the cost of a rubber stamp to have them returned.
I occasionally get cold emails from recruiters that come with length NDAs at the bottom (often longer than the actual content of the email). I find it utterly silly, but at least it's a strong signal that I won't be missing anything good by ignoring it.
if they had instead just said like "We're compiling something special for May 4th! Tweet @Disney using the hashtag #MayThe4th with your favorite Star Wars memory and you may see your memories featured (subject to TOS)" I think generally it's more honest. but yeah i guess no one cares to be 'that person'.
Ironically they militantly protect their brand, and have conflicting mandates and reasons for doing so (it's not just to keep the image, it's to keep others from deriving value from their brand). Sometimes those mandates interfere with each other, like we see here.
I'd speculate that the people running social media didn't want to send out these tweets and the people in legal told them they had to, so they do it a week ahead of time on a less visible twitter account and hope it blows over a bit.
This is Disney we're talking about. Their legal concerns generally trump everything. It would be ridiculous if not for the fact they're worth billions of dollars and could actually take people to court over small stuff like this.
I’m sure that the company who owns somewhere around 35 cable TV channels and half a dozen film studios has the stereotypical intern running social media.
Is this idea--that major brands let interns run their social media--ever going to die? It's like a decade out of date, at least.
It's a lock that social media at Disney is led by at least one senior official and probably maps down to multiple teams--marketing, comms, customer service, research, etc.--and probably at least one outside agency. I guarantee that Disney has people with experience in social media.
From Disney's perspective, this is a positive thing for their fans because it makes it easier for the fans who want to engage with them to do so--as opposed to the usual thing for user-submitted content, which would be a "microsite" web form with similar terms and conditions.
And there is very little downside. A few grumps will performatively mock Disney on Twitter for a week or so, which happens basically whenever Disney does anything. Knowing which complaints can be ignored is a good example of the benefit of actual experience with brand social media. For example, Apple had the same terms for their Shot On iPhone campaign, which no one seems to even remember:
>1. How to Enter. To enter the Shot On iPhone Challenge (“Contest”), upload the best photograph that you’ve taken on your iPhone within the six months preceding the start of the Contest Period (defined below) (the “Photo”) and Tweet, post, email or upload it, as applicable, with the hashtag #ShotoniPhone for Twitter or Instagram and #ShotoniPhone# or the Chinese localized hashtag #⽤用iPhone拍摄# for Weibo, along with information indicating which iPhone model was used in the image caption, via one of the following methods:
>(i)Via Twitter: Log onto your Twitter account and follow the links and instructions to become a follower of Sponsor’s page on Twitter, located at @Apple, and Tweet the photo with the required hashtags and other information. You must be an active holder of a non-private Twitter account and be a follower of @Apple to be eligible to enter this Contest via Twitter (i.e., you must make sure your tweets are set to “public” and not “private”). You must have a Twitter account to enter via this method. If you do not have a Twitter account, you can create one by visiting www.twitter.com. Twitter accounts are free.
> Providing a Submission constitutes entrant’s consent to give Sponsor a royalty-free, irrevocable, non-exclusive license to use, reproduce, publish and display such Submissions in whole or in part, on a worldwide basis, in any form, media or technology now known or later developed for one year for purposes of implementing the Contest.
https://www.apple.com/newsroom/au/pdfs/passions/photography/...
Meanwhile the folks who like Disney will feed them content and data for their campaign, which is what they wanted.