E-Mail Disclosure Agreements?

sloondogger asks: "I got an e-mail from a customer the other day that included this at the end of what was a clueless and annoying attempt to communicate anyway: 'This e-mail and any attachments are confidential and may contain commercially sensitive information and/or copyright material of Southern Ocean Systems Pty Ltd or third parties. You should only re-transmit or distribute the material if you are authorised to do so. This notice should not be removed.' I don't believe that there is anything that is legally binding to this statement. I, of course, removed it when I replied. I thought it would be interesting to find out if these do have any sort of legal power at all or if they are just annoying wastes of bandwidth." Does such an agreement have any more weight now that electronic signatures have passed?

Comments

Tangible medium, standard boilerplate,...

[coyote-san]

You should see the cover sheets that some law firms use on faxes... :-)

Anyway, something that Law 101 For Programmers should cover is that anything on your disk is "reduced to tangible form." On the one hand, that means that it's covered by copyright law. On the other hand, that means that you have to take more care with it than with, oh, a snippet of conversation overheard in a public bathroom.

Furthermore, there are a *lot* of places where this type of statement makes sense -- so much sense that failure to include it could give the sender a lot of grief. E.g., if I'm negotiating to sell something, someone at the other site lets the details of my offer out, and that information subsequently costs me a far larger sale because my competitor is able to underbid me.

Because of the latter concerns, what you saw was probably attached to *all* outbound mail automatically - at the same point a copy is made for future reference. :-) If you're already doing business with them then *that* contract probably says you'll honor the non-disclosure -- and ignore it could cost you your job (and make it harder to find another one, since you would be fired "for cause.") If it's from someone you don't know, then it should be treated the same way you want *your* misdelivered mail to be treated.

And if it's a Nigerian (or any other) scam, it should be forwarded to the appropriate authorities. That Nigerian scam has been bloody - some people actually traveled to Nigeria where they were kidnapped and/or killed.

(P.S., IANAL, but one of my graduate software engineering classes had a section on legal issues, and a visiting lecture by a local practicing lawyer.)

Blanket Use of Confidentiality Notice

[Detritus]

After doing some reading, I've found that there appear to be certain situations where a confidentiality notice makes sense.

• Patient Medical Records
• Trade Secrets
• Privileged Legal Documents
• Business Plans

Some lawyers recommend putting a confidentiality notice on every fax and email. I'm not sure that is a good idea. It devalues the meaning of the notice when it is applied without thought. It might backfire in court if you are trying to convince a judge/jury that you took reasonable precautions to protect the confidentiality of some information and the opposing lawyer can argue that the only steps you took were to automatically append some legal boilerplate to every fax and email.