Thoughts on Some Legal Disclaimers

Raymond Chen bloggedrecently about a disclaimers for a particular prize and it got me thinking about how inane some of these disclaimers are or how inane the circumstances are.

Some disclaimers make sense and should be there: "professional driver on closed course" and "don't try this at home". Some examples of the inane disclaimers or circumstances:

"Simulated Image" So, you're expecting us to accept that your product is so poor that a simulated image on your product (TV, cell phone, etc) in the commercial was necessary?

"Results not typical" Really, you're bending the truth and concentrating only on the positive superlative results? And people buy into it…

Email disclaimers. There are a special breed of stupid. For example: "This e-mail is intended for the addressee shown. It contains information that is confidential and protected from disclosure. Any review, dissemination or use of this transmission or its contents by persons or unauthorized employees of the intended organisations is strictly prohibited." If that were truly the case, why did you essentially broadcast the email across the Internet? Do you really think that makes the company devoid of any responsibility? Some of these disclaimers are actually larger than the real content. It would be interesting to see what proportion Internet bandwidth is a result of disclaimers (not including SPAM bandwidth…).