How did I miss this story?

After all, it involves railroads, history, intellectual property law, archives, and apparently, satire. And it was even discussed on Slashdot!

Yale University's LawMeme recently ran a couple of stories about what it calls the "Worst ToS Ever", the absurd website user agreement found on the website of the Central Pacific Railroad Photographic History Museum. Quoth LawMeme: "The legalese is an astonishing 21,000 words long, and gives every sign of having been professionally drafted by a competent lawyer with severe OCD...."

To be fair, the Museum, in its reply, does characterize this outburst of legalistic logorrhea as a "functional parody". Now it's certainly true that there's a lot to parody in intellectual property law nowadays, from absurdly over-reaching end-user-licence-agreements (EULAs), to what Ed Foster calls "patent absurdity", to attempts by companies like .. ahem... the Union Pacific Railroad to collect licensing fees for modelers' and historians' use of logos of long-ago-absorbed companies like the Missouri-Kansas-Texas, the Chicago & Eastern Illinois, the Texas & Pacific, et al, which UP does not currently use and has no apparent plan to ever use for any business purpose other than, well, collecting licensing fees.

The scary thing is, even Yale law students can't tell a parody from the real thing nowadays.