Warranty disclaimers with SHOUTY CAPITALS (was: licensing of XMPP specifications)

[Ben Finney <bignose+hates-spam@benfinney.id.au>]

John Halton <johnhalton@gmail.com> writes:

> Also, as regards the SHOUTY CAPITALS thing, I gather some
> jurisdictions in the US make this a legal requirement,

For what it's worth, the GPLv3 drafters researched the commonly-held
belief that SHOUTY CAPITALS are required for warranty disclaimers, and
concluded there was no such requirement:

    The warranty exclusions that were in GPL2 have not been changed
    saving one way: I took them out of all uppercase.

    [...] because no lawyer on Earth knows [why] they aren't in mixed
    case and everybody seems to think that everybody else knows and
    that he's the only one that doesn't know and he was absent that
    day in law school.

    <URL:http://www.ifso.ie/documents/gplv3-launch-2006-01-16.html#em-warranty>

> so the board may want to check their local legal position before
> finalising the non-shouty version.

If the board reveals something more substantive on the reason for
writing disclaimers in SHOUTY CAPITALS than "because that's what
everyone says you have to do", I'm sure many people would be
interested.

-- 
 \      "Probably the earliest flyswatters were nothing more than some |
  `\   sort of striking surface attached to the end of a long stick."  |
_o__)                                                   -- Jack Handey |
Ben Finney