On Aug 14, 2007, at 7:23 PM, Xiaofan Chen wrote:

> "Notice--This e-mail may contain confidential and privileged  
> material for
> the sole use of the intended recipient. Any review or distribution  
> by others
> is strictly prohibited. If you are not the intended recipient,  
> please contact
> the sender and delete all".
>
> This looks better since it is only for the official correspondent  
> and not
> for public consumption.

It still doesn't work.  Here's why.

You can't hold me to a contract if I have no business dealings with  
you.  If you accidentally send me something and I normally don't do  
any business with you at all, I can do whatever I want with the  
information you sent.  This has already been to multiple Federal  
courts here, and stands pretty firmly.

Of course, if I used the information you sent me for something  
profitable... you could still bring a nuisance lawsuit against me to  
TRY to enforce this, but it would either be settled out of court for  
a much smaller sum than we were making off of your idea (or we  
wouldn't have started production on it), or if your out of court  
offer was higher than it would cost us to pay the lawyers to take the  
case to trial, we'd pay the lawyers and  let it play out and it would  
be tossed out of court, after many thousands of dollars in legal fees.

Either way, you'd also have to pay those fees for the lawyers on your  
side, so it makes the case a difficult financial proposition for you,  
and not for the person who's run off with your idea.

And the disclaimer on the e-mail would still be worthless.

Pretty ruthless, but all the IP lawyer got you for writing up those  
fancy words (and think about how much he probably got paid to do  
that) was protection from your own customers.  If you have business  
dealings with someone already, there's usually far better ways to  
deal with an information leak than to sue a customer, which never  
goes over well.

So really, the moral of the story is... don't send e-mail to the  
wrong people, or you're in big trouble.  No disclaimer ever written  
on the e-mail will save you from anyone without ethics or morals.   
But such busywork as creating e-mail disclaimers will keep the lawyer  
paid in the manner to which he's accustomed to live... probably very  
well, really.  Find out how many billable hours and whether or not  
the lawyer charged the company for a golf/learning seminar on IP and  
a series of books on the topic, when he wrote that.  I bet he charged  
about 20 billable hours for that little blurb at over $100/hour, and  
added in expenses totaling at least $3500.

--
Nate Duehr
nate@natetech.com



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