Facebook’s legal team is in stunned silence today, after their seemingly airtight, carefully constructed and extensive 134-page Terms and Conditions legal agreement was undone and nullified by a simple Facebook status.
“When we first started this company all those years ago, we knew we would have to have legal safeguards in place to control content, oversee copyright management, and provide a general set of user terms and conditions that apply equally across our user database,” said the legal team in a lengthy statement this morning, “but how were we to know that a twenty-something-year old in South Africa would have the legal genius to undo all our care and work in one simple ten-sentence status? It was sheer brilliance.”
Facebook now says that, despite their document’s apparent legal strength and imperviousness, this new disclaimer, containing just twenty lines of text, was like kryptonite on an Achilles tendon made of glass.
“It hit us like a sack of bricks,” they said. “I mean, quoting the Rome Statute – a document usually reserved for outlining a court’s jurisdiction, structure and internal processes – was just, wow, incredible. We never saw it coming.”
The creator of the post, who is amazingly neither a law student nor legal expert in any way - says that beating the system like he did requires nothing but clever manoeuvring.
“When you sign up for Facebook and tick the box that says you have read and understood their terms and conditions of service and use, there are all kinds of nasty controls put on your photographs and all your user information that you upload,” said Andy Vokate, whose work has gone on to protect many thousands of enlightened, seasoned internet users, “but when you stumble upon some very clever legal arguments that some companies don’t want you to discover, you’ll see that these contracts are not worth the .txt file they’re written on.”
These legal arguments are incredible, say legal experts.
“We know this argument will be very powerful in court because it’s filled with all kinds of law words and legal phrases like ‘articles’ and ‘hereby’ and, geez, ‘tacitly’. Oh, and ‘foregoing’!” said legal counsel Eric Manders. “And an even more hard-hitting part of the argument is citing UCC 1 1-308 – 308 1 -103 and codes L.111, 112 and 113. Personally, I would quote paragraph 123 subsection a1 of L ACB 123456 or the infamous precendent of Hugh Justin v. May Dissup, but this is as good.”
He added that most judges were amenable to arguments like “really, who even reads these long confusing things? We all know everyone just scrolls to the bottom and clicks ‘Accept’.”
“Especially if they’re an iTunes user,” he said.
However, this post may have opened the floodgates for public legal declarations and defences, with this judiciary tactic being applied to many other industries and services.
“With this new resurgence of customer legal protection, companies are now being force to issue counter legal statuses on Twitter and Facebook,” said Manders. “Pretty soon, we’ll be seeing counter-counter-legal-announcements, and counter-counter-counter-counter notices. It’ll be like Inception, but with more law and less confusion.”
Whatever controversy arises, judges and Facebook users alike agree on one very simple fact: that this definitely is not a hoax.
“This is perfectly sound legal advice,” they said. “I mean, if it wasn’t, would it really be copied and pasted by hundreds of other people? I don’t think so.“
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