Be careful what you put in an email

The artist-label relationship is similar to entrepreneur-VC relationship in more than just this one regard. Angels/incubators are like indie labels, and the relationship there is slightly less skewed, but most parallels still exist.

They're respected for the same reason bands respect labels. It's because often times the only way to make it big, really big, is to be a sellout and get in bed with a label/VC. Businesses need funding like bands and supporting yourself is a bitch so why not sell out and get a free ride?

So we read up on business news and learn how the VCs think so that one day a few of us will get "signed" and hopefully make it big. We all know it can be a kind of predatory relationship but at the same time entrepreneurs are all about taking that one big risk that pays off in the end. So startups, like bands, try to get VC backing in the hope that they won't become yet another company that was chewed up and spit by the VCs and instead becomes the next Google/Facebook/CoolestCompanyEverCo.

So are they really respected? Kinda. Depends who you are. Much of that perceived respect is akin to research so we can get in bed with them. Kind of like books on how to easily bed women except we read it right from the horse's mouth.

> If you don't delete them, then your e-mail archives could be used against your company.

Unfortunately, the flip side might be as bad or worse: If you deleted emails or other potentially-relevant documents at a time when a lawsuit was reasonably foreseeable, then you could be hit with an adverse inference [1]. That is, the judge might conclusively presume (or instruct the jury to conclusively presume) that the missing emails or documents must have been really bad, otherwise you wouldn't have destroyed them.

And if government authorities were involved, then you could be indicted on criminal charges of obstruction of justice. (That ultimately destroyed accounting firm Arthur Andersen LLP [2].)

That's why opposing counsel can get downright orgasmic when their adversary has deleted emails or destroyed documents, and when this can be "spun" as having been motivated by a desire to conceal harmful evidence.

I used to think it made sense to adopt, and then follow, a comprehensive "document retention" [sic] policy, where documents are reviewed every X months for possible destruction. In the real world, though, people get busy, and they don't take the time to do periodic document reviews. Then, suddenly, a lawsuit is imminent, and people realize they still have all these documents that should have been routinely destroyed but never were. So they try to play catch-up with a shredding party. The belatedly-destroyed documents might be utterly harmless, but that might not matter. (A belated shredding party is what got Arthur Andersen indicted.)

RULES OF THUMB: If your organization doesn't already have a document-retention policy, here are two serviceable rules of thumb that might help (YMMV, I'm not your lawyer, etc.):

A) Keep emails and other documents for as long as you think you'll have a business need for them -- and keep in mind that sometimes the law mandates specific retention periods for certain categories of document;

B) If there's a non-trivial possibility of a lawsuit that would be even remotely related to the subject matter of the emails or other documents, then don't destroy them without first checking with your lawyer. As the saying goes, sometimes the cover-up --- whether real, or simply the product of opposing counsel's "spin" --- is worse than the crime.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adverse_inference

[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arthur_Andersen

It's pretty standard for CEOs and executives of publicly traded companies to delete all email -- not just locally, but ensure their entire email system, backups, etc are set to expunge an email entirely from the system as soon as they delete it.

Mainly for this reason.

Case in point: Eric Scmidt http://gawker.com/5505606/gmail-overlord-always-deletes-his-...

I worked at an investment banking company in the 1990s. They did not have email when I started, but when they adopted Exchange and everyone got a Windows PC and MS Office, the CIO set a policy that emails would be retained for 6 months, then purged. I don't know if this would fly today, but I think the fact that it was a blanket policy and not based on the content of the messages made it OK at least at that time.

What if you deleted the email you sent saying "Please ensure the crane you are using is rated for that load" and you need it when you get prosecuted by health and safety for the horrible accident that just happened.

EDIT: Or the email saying "Yes you can carry out the work in the manner you proposed but only if it will be at no extra cost to my client and you take full responsibility for the alteration to the original design"

Exactly. I tend to assume that any email I write might eventually wind up permanently plastered on the net somewhere. Face-to-conversation is not only safer but a lot more satisfying.

That's the problem. When these statements come up in court documents, they are never put in context. You're just left up on the stand mumbling about how everyone else is misinterpreting your words.

That's because people don't usually go out of their way to produce damning evidence. Damning evidence is an accident, that's why you don't find much of it, even among "tens of thousands of documents." Which is why careful scrutiny of discovery documents is important in any legal case.

> they don't report streaming data

What do you mean? How did you arrive at this conclusion?

Whether they are obligated to "report streaming data" is up to their contract, not ethics.

The email says "we use the label’s songs", "the data we got from them", "we pay them".

This suggests they were getting the label's data from the label and paying the label.

That seems like a license to me.

Thank you. I think people are dissecting my comment a bit much like they have an axe to grind. Someone mentioned getting things done over checking spelling. Please. Does it take that long to type an extra character or two. That's a bullshit argument. Then dyslexia? Well that's fine but dyslexia doesn't cause you to spell "because" as "cuz" so while I feel for dyslexics, that too is just not good enough. The remark about "oh what if the Nobel Prize winner was a Russiin chemist?"... Oh, come on with that. It's obvious what I mean. The point is that this type of spelling can make the smartest of us and those of us worthy of a lot of respect look like fools. People will write you off for it. Suppose this were written by Steve Forbes or Bill Gates or PG himself but we didn't know it. I'm willing to bet that if the recipient wasn't a close friend and didn't recognize the sender's address that they wouldn't be taken seriously. That's my point.

I think you get it darklajid. When someone writes this way it just reflects poorly on the person. My point was that people don't take you seriously even if you really are a genius that can help them if you write and speak in a manner like we see in this email. It it's a close friend then maybe it's fine but my overall point still stands despite the nit picking.