Microsoft's New Liability Disclaimer?

From the BitKit 1.0 Manual

Disclaimer of Liability

BitKit AssociatesTM, like any other self-respecting software company has no self-resepct when it comes to liability. We guarantee that the CD label is mostly free from most mechanical flaws, except ones it might happen to have, assuming a CD label had been affixed to the CD, and assuming the CD had been included in the package, and assuming we had remembered to send you a package after we took your credit card number. We not only guarantee nothing else, we also don't guarantee that these are the only things we don't guarantee. It's too bad if we have forgotten to include software on the CD. We sometimes do that, but not often enough that if you bought three or four copies you'd come up dry every time. Probably. And if we did include software, and it lunches your hard disk, it's just not out fault. And if this product causes your PC to explode, you can't come crying to us, because WE TOLD YOU SO using long convoluted clause-filled statements that you can hardly read and don't have time to anyway because you have better things to do with your time but our lawyers, who wrote the forgoing, and who actually use words like forgoing in their daily speech not only don't have better things to do with their time but get paid huge wads of cash to write Proprietary Rights Statements that guarantee that we can do whatever the hell we want to and there's nothing you can do about it.

Like Microsoft and the other big software guys, we think that you're lucky to have any product at all. A software product that might work even some of the time is just that much better. If you do have a bad enough CD label, in our sole opinion, we'll send you a new one, as soon as we make up our mind. But we reserve the right to do so if and when we damn well please.

We also reserve the right to revise this publication and to make changes in its content, including this Statement of Proprietary Rights and Disclaimer of Liability, without the slightest obligation to notify any person of such revision or changes, including the person who is in charge of our publications, the people who are supposed to make sure that the product and the documentation match, or the programmers doing the work. And if we reserve the right not to notify them, we're sure as hell not going to waste our time notifying you.

When it comes right down to it, we reserve the right to do anything that we want with our product. After all, it's ours. You didn't work on it. You didn't spend long sleepless nights and long sleepy days creating the thing. The mere fact that you've paid money for a license for it doesn't make you special at all. There are a lot of other people out there who've paid for licenses too, and we don't treat them any better than we treat you. If you feel dissatisfied, you can ask for your money back, but don't bother. We've already spent it.

Comments are closed