I’ve landed a new client for Zing, and they’re asking me to sign a non-disclosure agreement. This isn’t anything new or unusual– it happens fairly often when I start projects. What makes this one a bit different is that the client is a law firm. And they take their NDA quite seriously.
My favorite part of it is the clause discussing confidential business information and how I’m not supposed to disclose it to others. But rather than saying I just can’t disclose it “electronically”, they specify all of the ways I might do so:
You will not otherwise permit such Confidential Information to be available, stored electronically or otherwise, published, distributed, transmitted or delivered in any form whatsoever, including without limitation the Internet, intranet, telnet, gopher, Archie, ftp (file transfer protocol), bft (binary file transfer), world wide web, news groups, BBS/bulletin boards, list servers, mail servers, archive sites, e‐mail, TCP/IP (transmission control protocol/internet protocol, including TCP, IP, UDP, ARP, RARP, and ICMP), SMTP (simple mail transfer protocol), POP (post office protocol), CDF (Channel Definition Format), MCF (Meta Content Framework), push, NNTP (network news transfer protocol), MIME (multipurpose internet mail extensions), HTTP (hypertext transfer protocol), HDTP (handheld device transfer protocol), radio, caches, search engines, spiders, bots, television, electronic, audio, CD ROM, PCS (personal communication services), and any other medium, regardless of language or program, including without limitation HTML (hypertext markup language), Dynamic HTML, XML (extensible markup language), VRML (virtual reality modeling language), SGML, Java, JavaBeans, JavaScript, scripting, Perl, CGI (common gateway interface), ActiveX, and HDML (handheld device markup language).
Wow, that’s pretty comprehensive. To think they’re worried I might post their information on a BBS, or perhaps on a Gopher site somewhere. Hah! Those technologies are so 1990.