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Comment by chooseaname | Hacker News Reader

> Senders of official-looking direct mail get around these restrictions by including language — often in fine print — declaring that the correspondence is not in fact official.

Ban fine print. Honestly. Anything that declares the correspondence is not official has to be in the same point size as the body of the text, separated out into it's own paragraph in plain no uncertain terms that the majority of adults could understand.

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I worked at a title company and owned the escrow and documentation preparation software. At the time they used line printers to print on carbon copy forms. Each page was differently colored so the "original" was always the white top copy. Getting a new copy of the paperwork was of course expensive and only the original was accepted for certain purposes.

We had a very interesting conversation with the doc prep department when I moved everything to using high speed laserjet printers. "Which one is the original, now?" The end result was someone buying a large rubber stamp that read "Original." :-)

A friend worked had a government contractor as a client that had to use a specific, 8-9 part carbon form because the form was referenced in law and had to be used. Due to other issues, the law couldn’t be amended.

At some point, it became difficult to get a printer and paper that would work with that many imprints!

That's actually what drove the title company to switch to laser: the forms kept getting thicker and the bottom layer impression was too faint.

I'd have repeated:

"they're identical. doesn't matter. but I got a stamp to tell you which one."

Put yourself in their shoes. What if one copy says the interest rate is 3.5%, and the other says 3.8%? You SAY they are the same, but are the really?

If you have a strict policy of "one version is the 'original' and the rest are 'copies'", then wording of the 'original' gets legal priority. Legal priority == much lower legal bills.

If you have a policy of "they are all the same", then when they are different, you have a nasty, expensive legal fight.

The real issue to me then and now was how do you prove the original is the original? I pointed out then that frankly a good enough photocopy would also be indistinguishable despite a rubber stamp. I no longer remember but I guess the answer to that is red ink. This was prior to color photocopies being readily available. Or maybe they bought themselves a crimper and embossed a stamp.

Ink marks on the laler can be chemically analyzed, and I am sure forensics teams learned long ago how to identify a photo copy.

Take a look under a microscope. The difference between a rubber stamp whose ink bleeds into the paper and a Xerox which is kind of melted on the paper is enormous.

Or the courts should start taking graphic design into account: if there is any ambiguity, the large & legible print should be enforced and the difficult to read fine print disregarded.

I just throw out any mailing that pretends to be official but isn't (it's not hard to distinguish - official ones tell you who's sending it and why, scam ones don't), regardless of what it says. If they feel the need to trick me even before our business has started, there's no chance they intend to be honest later, so why would I want to do any business with overt crooks?

And then this paragraph would get moved into an obscure area unlikely to be read. It's a cat and mouse game

Doesn't even need to be obscure. Write enough prose ahead of it and most will never get to that part.

I can't understand how the fine print is not deceptive and/or misleading per se.

* wording

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