the world first laughed its socks off at the inappriateness of the Google Chrome EULA.

(Apologies to everyone else posting on the same meme).

...this Reg article doesn't contain any obvious grammar/spelling/jargon failures. Hooray!

I thought those were extinct.

This is exactly the same practice which cased the cockup with Google's Chrome EULA.

Incidentally the learned judge is one of the authors of that fine tome "The Modern Law of Copyright and Designs", the second edition of which is available for a very reasonable £556 on Amazon.

Alliteration? Yes! Hyperbole Yes!! Polysemantics? Yes!!! Ambiguity? er maybe. Typos? Definitely.

But malapropism - have I even spelled it correctly?

But also making it clear that drafting legal documents of nearly any kind isn't a job for amateurs, not even for lawyers without specialized experience. That's why in government circles you will find back rooms occupied by "legislative counsel", who make sure that proposed laws are drafted with due care so they mean what their proposers mean them to mean. (Except perhaps under NuLabour's smiling and beneficent regime where egalitarianism assigns such tasks to teen-aged secretaries.)

One almost wonders if the agreements drafted by managers and polished by marketing wonks (mentioned in passing by "Frank") represent the practice of law by non-lawyers....

posting on the same whatnow?

- scientific authority invents a word to describe the concept of "ideas that take off"

- no-one bar the chap in question, half a dozen journos and a dozen sad tech freaks ever use the word.

you couldn't make it up. (well, er, he did.)

ps is it "meam" when we go all phonetic?

but I'm really struggling to see how anyone could interpret A or B to possibly mean A and B?

If somebody did both, that would be more of a legal issue. Its definitely not an xor, but that would be one for the lawyers, claiming paying royalties for both, didn't fulfil the contract to pay for one or the other :)

Well, if the amateur sticks to saying how they want the agreement to work, explains the sentiment of the agreement, tries to cover all scenarios and most importantly doesn't try to sound like they're a lawyer they could well do a better job.

The law doesn't require that we use long words or their whacky terminology you know.

This also highlights the importance of standardised language, again. Cum fonetic spelin hu nos wot a contract wil meen?

It is all in the semantics

In common English A or B means A xor B

In logic A or B means A or B or (A and B)

in real English:

"you can have an apple *or* an orange" -> implies either but not both

"you cannot drive if you are drunk *or* unlicensed" -> does not imply you are legal to drive if both pissed and banned at the same time.