Postscript to a letter of recommendation

Recently, I wrote a letter of recommendation for a student who is applying for an internship. The organization that sponsors the internship program has outsourced the handling of letters of recommendation to ApplyYourself, Inc., a “recruiting solutions” company. In order to submit the letter of recommendation, therefore, I had to point my browser to a URL provided by ApplyYourself and upload the file containing the letter to their site.

However, before I could submit the letter, I was confronted by a long “Terms of Use” document -- long enough to require its own separately scrolling subwindow -- and required to consent to it. The mindset of the authors of such documents fascinates me; it's as if they sat down and asked themselves, “What would be the most effective way to alienate the people on whom our business depends? How can we ensure that they are hostile and irritable when they engage in any transaction with us? What absurd pretentions will best express our contempt for the suckers who voluntarily help bring together the organizations that hired us and the applicants who depend on our services?''

After studying the “Terms of Use” carefully, I went back and added a postscript to the letter of recommendation that I was submitting:

DECLARATION

I hereby rescind and disavow my coerced assent to the “Terms of Use” announced by ApplyYourself, Inc., as a condition of use of their online recommendation service. In particular, notwithstanding the “Terms of Use” document:

(1) I will continue to use any device, software or routine that I deem to be appropriate and legal, in my sole and absolute discretion, without regard to whether, as a consequence of defects in the design, implementation, or maintenance of ApplyYourself, Inc.'s software, such use “may interfere ... with the function of the online recommendation system” or “impose any unreasonable burden or load on the ApplyYourself systems.”

(2) I retain the copyright on any letter of recommendation that I submit through the ApplyYourself system and hereby refuse, deny, and reject the claim that “[o]nce you submit the recommendation, you relinquish all rights in the recommendation and it becomes the sole and absolute property of the institution.” I hereby affirm that this letter of recommendation is published under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike license, version 2.5, which grants anyone who obtains a copy of the letter a world-wide, royalty-free, non-exclusive, perpetual license to copy, distribute, display, and perform it and to make derivative works from it, provided that he or she attributes the letter in a manner that I specify, that he or she does not use the letter for commercial purposes, and that any derivative work based on the letter be distributed under the same license. A copy of this license can be found on the World Wide Web at http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/2.5/legalcode and a summary intelligible to non-lawyers can be found at http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/2.5/; alternatively, any interested party can obtain a copy of the license by sending a request to Creative Commons, 543 Howard Street, 5th Floor, San Francisco, California 94105, USA.

If this license, together with the usual “fair use” rights, is insufficient for the uses contemplated by ApplyYourself, Inc., or [the organization to which the recommendation was addressed], they are welcome to negotiate with me for a more permissive license, which however is not likely to be royalty-free.

(3) I reject ApplyYourself, Inc.'s claim to “be entitled to equitable relief upon a breach of these Terms of Use” and hereby affirm that under no circumstances will I accept legal or financial liability of any kind for the use of their on-line recommendation system, regardless of any claims by ApplyYourself, Inc. concerning alleged breaches of the Terms of Use, whether or not the specific terms are among those mentioned in this Declaration.

I don't know whether or not such a Declaration would have any legal force. (Of course, it's not obvious that the “Terms of Use” document would have any force, either.) Nevertheless, it did my heart good to write it.