On Sun, Jun 08, 1997 at 06:14:59PM -0500, William H. Geiger III wrote:
In <v03102802afc0e602d172@[207.167.93.63]>, on 06/08/97 at 03:48 PM, Tim May <tcmay@got.net> said: [...]
Contracts, with clearly stated conditions and with judgeable or falsifiable/testable conditionals, are a matter for the courts (private courts, in fact), but vague promises, advertisements, propaganda, etc. are not.
Clear now?
Well I would have to dissagre. Advertisements should be covered under contract law as verbal contracts. If I advertise that "X" does "Y" but it really does "Z" then this is clearly fraudulent behavior.
The difficulty is in proving that "X" does "Z" and not "Y" but that is an exercise left to the civil courts.
I agree that advertisements are in many cases a verbal contract ("does 0-60mph in 5 seconds flat"), but this seems to be intrinsically messy. There aren't any simple, clear-cut rules that separate advertising from other speech. But the fundamental principle that says "redress is available for speech that causes harm" seems fairly clean. That cuts across advertising, salespersons lies, libel/slander, yelling "fire" in a theater -- a whole gamut of free speech issues. Spam falls under such a rule, as well. Of course, the issue of prior restraint is orthogonal to this rule... -- Kent Crispin "No reason to get excited", kent@songbird.com the thief he kindly spoke... PGP fingerprint: B1 8B 72 ED 55 21 5E 44 61 F4 58 0F 72 10 65 55 http://songbird.com/kent/pgp_key.html