The lesson here: it was 1998. "The industry" was still a little fledgling, so the legal territory was still largely unchartered. But it grew into an ugly duckling, quickly.
Sent the contract to my lawyer. She marked it up, sent it to the client. Then the client marked it up and sent it back to my lawyer. And so on, back and forth for almost a month.
Garbage in, garbage out. During the "ugly duckling" phase, the legal machine is just learning that it can spew garbage. It tests its limits. Just how much garbage can it spit before something happens? When the garbage is between private parties? Apparently, a lot.
I charged my first client $1,400. My second client paid $5,400. The next paid $24,000. I remember the exact amounts — they were the largest checks I’d seen up til that point.
Then I wrote a proposal for $340,000...
The Bust was just growing pains.
It probably could be reasonably argued that the industry is still in an ugly duckling phase (multi-Billion dollar valuations, really?)
But this is part of growing up.
In Code and Other Laws of Cyberspace Lessig writes:
It is a lack of a certain kind of regulation that produced the Y2K problem, not too much regulation. An overemphasis on the private got us here, not an overly statist federal government. Were the tort system better at holding producers responsible for the harms they create, code writers and their employers would have been more concerned with the harm their code would create. Were contract law not so eager to allow liability in economic transactions to be waived, the licenses that absolved the code writers of any potential liability from bad code would not have induced an even greater laxity in what these code writers were producing. And were the intellectual property system more concerned with capturing and preserving knowledge than with allowing private actors to capture and preserve profit, we might have had a copyright system that required the lodging of source code with the government before the protection of copyright was granted, thus creating an incentive to preserve source code and hence create a resource that does not now exist but that we might have turned to in undoing the consequences of this bad code. If in all these ways government had been different, the problems of Y2K would have been different as well.
[source: http://www.code-is-law.org/conclusion_excerpt.html]
This is dated (1999), but interesting. He was wrong about Y2K, of course, but not about the underlying issues and problems with contract law and IP.