<sigh> Ofcource what I say in a contract is "free". I can say anything I want in a contract solong as the parties involved agree.
Are ads a part of the contract, though?
I wouldn`t say so, in the UK the DTI and the Director of fair trading
regulates the market in such a way that one cannot make claims that are
known to be false in advertisements. To use your example, if you post an
ad saying Borscht
If I enter into a sales contract with Kent to give him borsch to cure his cancer, and this is not an FDA-approved treatment, then this contract is against public policy and shouldn't be enforceable. :-)
Exactly, but of course your only real crime would be the breach of contract, not the FDA-Non approval, this breach would of course be a civil crime the penalties for which would be part of the contract or defined in an external "default penalties" contract which would be implicitly #included into the original contract.
But to convict me of fraud, the gubmint should prove that borshch doesn't cure cancer. How would one prove that?
This is why I think such a contract would not occur, even if it were a more sensible example (eg. a few years ago before the mainstream tests, saying that AZT prolonged the life of HIV carriers), more likely the contract would say that the AZT/Borscht etc. "increased the probability of cure/increased the probability of living longer" etc. This would be virtually impossible to disprove, unless the improvement probability were to be specified. To disprove that Borscht cures cancer would be a simple matter which I leave as an exercise to the reader ;-). Datacomms Technologies data security Paul Bradley, Paul@fatmans.demon.co.uk Paul@crypto.uk.eu.org, Paul@cryptography.uk.eu.org Http://www.cryptography.home.ml.org/ Email for PGP public key, ID: FC76DA85 "Don`t forget to mount a scratch monkey"