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I guess I just don’t understand contracts and laws. Your employment agreement can include stuff like “if you say anything bad about us, even to your family in y
by chamomeal 6mo ago
I guess I just don’t understand contracts and laws. Your employment agreement can include stuff like “if you say anything bad about us, even to your family in your own home, you owe us $50,000”.
What in the world?? I guess NDA’s are like that, and used everywhere. Still it just seems wild
- Joker_vD 6mo agoAh, don't worry, we have a concept of "onerous clause doctrine" to help with that. Of course, it's almost entirely up to a judge's discretion what is and is not onerous, so...
- sbarre 6mo agoAnd you might spend more than $50,000 challenging it in court, because the billion dollar corporation you signed it with would rather spend the money against you than set a precedent everyone else could use against them in the future.
- malfist 6mo agoWell this is locked away in arbitration, so it'll never see a judge. Just the shadow court system owned and operated by the Epstein class. Because the existing system wasn't biased enough towards moneyed interests
- kubb 6mo agoFree speech on one hand, legal system capture on the other.
- SauntSolaire 6mo agoThere's (perhaps unfortunately) nothing stopping you from signing away your freedom of speech.
- FpUser 6mo agoIn a normal society courts should be protecting from signing away basic freedoms
- 0x3f 6mo agoWhat are 'basic freedoms'?
- ceejayoz 6mo agoFree speech?
- 0x3f 6mo agoSo I can't sign an exclusive book deal? Or write for a newspaper?
- ceejayoz 6mo agoExclusive book deals tend to have defined timespans. I'm not clear on the newspaper example; do you think reporters aren't allowed to write stuff outside their job? Plenty of reporters publish books.
- 0x3f 6mo agoNo I just mean in the sense that I give over the rights to my own words. I can't repeat them outside of the context that I've agreed to. They were both examples of the same kind of agreement. They'll keep those rights well after I'm dead, by the way.
- TheOtherHobbes 6mo agoYou're not giving over the rights, you're selling the right to profit from them under contract. You can argue that contract law is essentially a battle of relative political and economic power, and IP and employment contracts will always be unfair unless limits are set by statute and enforced enthusiastically. And personally I would. But generally you're signing away the rights to specific text, not the insights or commentary in that text, and if you freelance there's nothing to stop you making your points through some other channel, and/or some other text. If you're a full-time employee then the usual agreement is that your words (code) are work product and owned by your employer, and you're in that situation because your political and economic power is relatively limited.
- groundzeros2015 6mo agoFreedom of speech is that you are allowed to express any viewpoint, not make any sounds with your mouth or disclose any information.
- 0x3f 6mo ago> I guess I just don’t understand contracts and laws. What's to understand? Person agrees to thing. Person is held to thing.
- browningstreet 6mo agoAnd yet it’s not even that simple. Contracts can be invalidated. Other countries have fairness doctrines with allow/disallow lists of things that can be included in contracts. There are other ways.
- dghlsakjg 6mo agoThe US has limits on contracts as well, and courts can and will invalidate clauses or entire contracts for a variety of reasons. Read any of your terms and conditions, there is almost always a clause in there saying that if a clause is found to be unenforceable, you agree that the rest of the contract is still valid. The bar is a lot lower in the states, but it’s still there. E.g. You can sign a contract to work for less than minimum wage, it will be entirely thrown out in court.
- TrackerFF 6mo agoSure, as long as it is within the framework of the law. Some contracts are illegal, and purely made to intimidate the other party - and completely rests on the fact that said other party will never challenge or even check if the contract is valid in the first place. Hence why so many of these contracts also have arbitration clauses which stipulate that the parties must resolve through private arbitration. Any time someone has the balls to challenge these things is also a win for the working man.
- 0x3f 6mo ago> Sure, as long as it is within the framework of the law. You mean, like the one in the article the GP is pretending not to understand?
- nativeit 6mo agoHuman Cent-iPad style?
- jeffbee 6mo agoIt's a condition of the severance payment. She didn't need to sign it. She wanted the money. Then she violated the terms of the contract.
- ghostpepper 6mo agoI'm not a lawyer but even if it was, eg. a year's salary at the time she accepted it, is that really a fair price for a lifetime of silence?
- jeffbee 6mo agoYes?
- sieabahlpark 6mo ago[dead]
- Esophagus4 6mo agoThat would be up to her, wouldn’t it? And she signed it, so presumably it was for her.
- devilbunny 6mo agoMaybe? Is your argument that there is no fair price, or that it wasn’t enough? The former makes NDAs unenforceable.
- fmajid 6mo agoNDAs cannot cover whistleblowing of actual criminality, including sexual harassment, which is why modern NDAs take pains to disclaim that, so they wouldn't be invalidated on that basis. Presumably the behavior exposed in the book, while arguably immoral or amoral, doesn't rise to the standard of criminality.
- loeg 6mo agoWriting a book isn't covered whistleblowing. If she wants to go to the FBI or whatever, no one can stop her.
- torton 6mo agoI think people living outside the US don't realize how few disputes here are actually allowed to use the official legal system when dealing with companies of non-trivial size. Many employment contracts, many service contracts, and even website terms of use require mandatory arbitration in lieu of pursuing one's claims in court. And arbitrator companies (some of which are explicitly for-profit) know the hand that feeds them.
- Aurornis 6mo ago> Your employment agreement can include stuff like “if you say anything bad about us, even to your family in your own home, you owe us $50,000”. Non-disparagement clauses are limited by the law, which in the United States is augmented by state-level restrictions. There have been some recent developments from the NRLB limiting how severance agreements can be attached to non-disparagement clauses, too. So it's not generally true that you can be liable for $50K for saying anything bad about your employer in your own home. The situation with this author is on the other end of "in your own home" spectrum: They went out and wrote a whole book against their employer that violates NDAs, too. Regardless of what you think about Meta or the author, this was clearly a calculated move on their part to draw out a lawsuit because it provides further press coverage and therefore book sales (just look at all the comments in this thread from people claiming they're motivated to go buy it it now). Whether the gamble pays off or not remains to be seen.
- renewiltord 6mo agoHuh, I didn't think of that. If you are aware of the Streisand Effect, it is only logical to use it to your own advantage. Just like Cunningham's Law, you can often get the right answer by posting the wrong one. In fact, this is probably the first time someone is knowingly using the Streisand Effect to their own advantage. There are no prior examples.
- amtamt 6mo agoOverall this feels a good thing for public, even if the author is money oriented, because this will hopefully make even more details public. I personally have no qualms about one criminal extorted by another, specially if their fued is making world better for everyone.