March 10, 2009

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Dear {!firstname}:

Welcome to Your WEBSITE LAW ALERT by Chip Cooper and DigiContracts.com

Chip's Commentary:

I look forward to reading Peggy Noonan's columns in the online version of the Wall Street Journal.

In her February 20, 2009 column, "Remembering the Dawn of the Age of Abundance -- Times are hard, but dynamism isn't dead", she writes:

"I end with a hunch that is not an unhappy one. Dynamism has been leached from our system for now, but not from the human brain or heart. Just as our political regeneration will happen locally, in counties and states that learn how to control themselves and demonstrate how to govern effectively in a time of limits, so will our economic regeneration. That will begin in someone's garage, somebody's kitchen, as it did in the case of Messrs. Jobs and Wozniak. The comeback will be from the ground up and will start with innovation. No one trusts big anymore. In the future everything will be local. That's where the magic will be. And no amount of pessimism will stop it once it starts."

Nail, meet hammer.

Is Your SaaS Agreement Enforceable -- Even Against Simba, The Agreeable Cat?

In the last few weeks, I've had a newsletter subscriber and a client refer me to an interesting article on the Web.

It's about a kitty cat named Simba that walked across a keyboard and clicked on an online, click-through agreement (also known as a "click-wrapped" agreement). The article is entitled "The Agreeable Cat", by Ann Loucks, and you can read it here.

The Agreeable Cat article is popular -- it's been picked up by boingboing and by slashdot.

My client wanted to know whether the agreement was enforceable. My reply - against Simba the cat, or its owner who put Simba up to this?

After a chuckle, I thought the question really had merit, and you may read my analysis here.

Comments From Digicontracts.com:

We're continuing our testing of our API product that will allow website developers, automated website generators, and vendors of content management software to offer our website legal compliance service that will completely automate document selection and drafting -- and also will automatically insert the documents into a user's site (with no action required by the user).

We're excited about this new product, and we'll keep you posted on our progress.

Regards,

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