What language is your contract in /

Comment on more on who owns the programming and codes

 February 12, 2013



 Question - Language of Contract - Does it Matter

Ken,

Question on language contract is written.  Our company has a good size ( very diverse) account base. Mainly residential and small commercial. Many of our customers do not speak good English. I assume they don't read it that well either. We have customers from Mexico and places down south, all over the Middle East, China, Viet Nam and other countries. Our contracts are written in English. If we had a dispute with a customer could there be problems because we did not supply a contract in their language?

Mark

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Answer

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No point having a contract that the courts won't enforce.  Even worse, using a contract that the state Attorney General determines constitutes deceptive business practices.  All states have various consumer protection laws.  These laws generally address home improvement contracts and contracts that are generated by door to door sales.  The rule of thumb for these laws is that the contract needs to be in the same language as the salesman used to negotiate the deal.  An interesting issue, which I haven't researched, is what about a salesman who speaks only English and sells a system to a Spanish only speaking customer.  Technically the contract is in the language spoken by the salesman.  The best practice is to have your contracts translated into the language you believe your customers speak especially if you have sales people speaking that language.  

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comment on more on who owns the programming and codes from Jan 30, 2013 article

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Ken,

This is a response to who owns the programming and the code to alarm systems.

Our company has a clause in our agreement stating that we own the programming that we enter in the customer alarm system.  We feel that a vulnerability exists if the customer has the programming code to the alarm panel, in that we can not guarantee that another person has not entered programming and made changes to the alarm system which could adversely effect it's operation and open ourselves to liability.  We also install a sensor inside the panel to ensure that the panel door remains closed until we ourselves re-enter it.  Should the panel door be opened, the alarm sounds and the panel can not be rearmed until our technician visits the panel and ensures that all wiring and devices are 100% intact and no unapproved changes has been made to the system.  We do charge a service call in this event. 

If our company is the sole owner of the programming and the code, then the liability stays with us.  If this code is given to the home owner and an event occurs, we will be the ones pulled into litigation yet it may not be our fault at all.  If this should happen, there will be no way to prove it wasn't our fault!

If at the end of our agreement with our customer in good standing (we are fully paid for our services) and they wish to terminate our services, we will reset the panels program code to the factory default setting.  We will not make a service call if there are open items on the customers account.

This seems to work for our company.

 Sincerely, 

Steven Craddock, Owner / Engineer 

Digitech Security Controls Inc.


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