On 06/12/2013 12:49 AM, unix_fan wrote:
I've signed tons of NDAs in my career, not a single one of them had a "But you can go ahead and blab about it if *you* individually decide it's not right" clause. Maybe LinkedIn can add a checkbox for those who reserve the right to make judgement calls about the confidentiality of our employer's data. If that's what one believes, why hide it.
As far as I can tell? almost nobody takes written NDAs seriously. Half of the NDAs I've seen for contractors say you can't tell anyone about the relationship. You ask the client? and they say "Oh no, just use common sense" I mean, I have enough of a reputation that I can be the asshole who makes them cross that line out and initial, but how many people do that? Not very many. And how many people leave contracting gigs off their resume? not very many. I've seen a /lot/ of NDAs (I've seen /many/ more NDAs than I've signed) and the vast majority have that bit about how you are supposed to keep the relationship secret.
I mean, I read through the things, and get the most obviously unreasonable bits changed, but it's legal boilerplate written in legal language. My reading and logic skills are pretty okay, but I'm no legal specialist, and even I don't bring in a lawyer on those things.[1]
Most people don't keep track of NDAs. Most people don't take the text of the document seriously, because it was written by lawyers for the client, sure, but it is usually not understood by the contractor /or/ the client.
Sure, secrets are secrets, and depending on the type of secret, sure, we take that sort of thing very seriously. But those expectations need to be worked out in a language that both the consultant and the client understand, not in ten pages of boilerplate. (Here, I mean that some places it's okay to submit code upstream, other places, not so much. The NDA certainly doesn't make those expectations clear.)
[1]I actually spent a bunch of time trying to get a lawyer to help me with a privacy policy. Problem is? the lawyer kept trying to say, essentially "Luke can do whatever the fuck he wants" which is the opposite of what you want in a privacy policy. And he wanted the document to be so long that nobody would really read it. I don't know how much a lawyer would help when reading an NDA>
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