HRoth - 7:55 pm on Feb 14, 2006 (gmt 0)

I looked into the issue of disclaimers when I started out, because the way the law is written pertaining to one aspect of my niche, a huge grey area is opened whenever someone asks certain questions about totally legal products. I discovered that it is a federal offense to sell even innocuous things when you have the reasonable suspicion that they will be used in a way that is illegal, and answering questions about illegal use would be proof that I had reason to suspect that these widgets would be used in a way that the law does not allow. Bad.

The way competitors handled this was to put up a disclaimer along the lines of "Widgets to be used for display purposes only." However, they would then go ahead and answer customer questions that showed that they knew that the widgets were going to be used for purposes other than display. Lots of these people ended up being arrested in all sorts of fed Internet "sting" operations. Their disclaimers did nothing to protect them.

For instance, there was a company that was selling perfectly legal, non-scheduled, non-listed chemicals. They had a disclaimer saying these were sold for research purposes only, but in fact the owner had a reasonable suspicion that people were buying them to get high, and he got sent to jail. His disclaimer didn't do jack for him. Would a corporation have shielded him? How? He broke the law.

I decided that a disclaimer is just hypocrisy in any case and also ended up shedding products that tended to attract people who wanted to use the product for something illegal and involve me in their stupidity. There are plenty of other ways to make money, after all, ways that don't put you in any legal grey zones.

If this guy is structuring his business specifically to avoid legal problems and is thinking a disclaimer is going to protect him, he is in for a real rude surprise. Yes, a corporation does offer financial protection but it's not going to help him if he's committing criminal acts. And it is way easier to commit a criminal act that one would imagine. Plus since it's the Internet, it's the feds he would be dealing with, not some State buffoons. Think endless money, endless time, and endless necessity to justify their existence by producing arrests.