An Examination of the Legal Disclaimer in Neal Stephenson's Cryptonomicon

Since I don't have time to write a real post today, I thought I'd give you something amazingly random. It was originally posted to rec.arts.sf.written 6/20/00, but, no, I don't have a clue what the context was. I can only assume it made some kind of sense at the time.

Well, let's see what the actual disclaimer in Cryptonomicon is, shall we?

"This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, organizations, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental and beyond the intent of either the author or publisher."

Some thoughts:
1) Avon prefers the serial comma. Don't know why that annoys me, but it does.

2) The third sentence is clearly a big stretch applied to this book (and, indeed, to any historical fiction with real named characters and events).

3) The critical phrase is at the end of sentence 2: "or used fictitiously." Though I doubt I could define quite what that means, it's clear that this is the legal foundation of the whole claim, in the case of this book. I imagine News Corp. has quite a slew of lawyers who could bury us all in paper pertaining to fictitious usages if they wanted to. The central point, though, is fairly clear: one is not to take the representations in this book of anything with the same name as a thing in the real world as direct reportage of those things.

4) The whole thing is a roundabout legal way of saying "We don't mean any of it, so don't sue us."

5) Avon has one of the longer and more convoluted disclaimers that I've come across. (Coincidentally, this is the second time today I've had to type up an Avon disclaimer, so the comparison of it with other publishers' language is fresh in the mind.)

6) Alan Turing is dead, and so can not be slandered. (Not that this has anything directly to do with the disclaimer, but it needed to be said.)

7) Numbered lists are inordinately fun, and quite difficult to stop once started.