I really hate this response, and I've heard it so many times. It's "boilerplate" only because nobody can be bothered to read it to find out how they're being screwed, mostly because most of these are ridiculously long. If one doesn't want to negotiate, that's fine, but just be straight about it and quit wasting my time.

In one particular "contract", it was also insinuated that I didn't know what I was talking about, because I was (am) not a lawyer. I might not be, but I am not signing anything about "copywrite" (sic). (And there were more semantic errors to that particular one: I was being asked to sign over rights to a work that I didn't have rights to. They had waited until literally the day of a performance to show us this, too. It didn't get signed.)

Then the title person later was like, "Almost all of this is standardized stuff. It's not really like you can negotiate it at this point."

Whatever, lady, I want to know what I'm signing, I want to see that this version matches the version I already signed last night (it didn't), and for half a million bucks, you can hang out for ten minutes while I do it.