<p> Ars Technica has an article about a <a href="http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/2011/05/all-your-reviews-are-belong-to-us-medical-justice-vs-patient-free-speech.ars">dentist&#39;s office requring you sign over the copyright of any statements you make about them online</a> before you may receive treatment. There is apparently a company that is dedicated to making this a regular feature of all of our health-care encounters.</p> <p> Ars&#39; dissection of why the contract cannot fulfill it&#39;s stated purpose is spot on: the dentist&#39;s office says the contract is supposed to prevent &#34;competitors and disgruntled employees&#34; from posting fraudulent reviews–but competitors certainly will not have signed the contract, so how could it govern them? Disgruntled employees might well have signed such a contract, but given the semi-anonymous nature of posting information to the web in this day and age, how could the office make the determination that a particular poster was a former employee in order to request that the statements be removed?</p>

<p> An interesting point about the thoughtlessness of some of our legal forms–the silliness of standard boilerplate suggesting that Neal Stephenson&#39;s Baroque Cycle wasn&#39;t connected to actual events and persons…right after many pages detailing exactly how it was.</p> <p> <a href="http://yglesias.thinkprogress.org/2011/01/strange-disclaimer/">Noted by Yglesias</a></p>