{"id":17593,"date":"2012-11-03T09:40:20","date_gmt":"2012-11-03T14:40:20","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/?p=17593"},"modified":"2012-11-03T09:40:20","modified_gmt":"2012-11-03T14:40:20","slug":"contract-law-and-brown-mms","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/2012\/11\/03\/contract-law-and-brown-mms\/","title":{"rendered":"Contract law and brown M&Ms"},"content":{"rendered":"

What is it about Van Halen and their notorious demand for non-brown M&Ms<\/a> in their contracts? It’s actually rather clever:<\/p>\n

Take Van Halen, for example. On the surface, the group is famous not only for its music but also for stunts such as trashing green rooms over the presence of brown M&Ms, and it\u2019s easy to write off such behavior as simply being symptomatic of a 1980\u2019s rock diva mentality. In reality, however, the brown M&Ms served an important purpose from a contracting perspective.<\/p>\n

Think about it- wouldn\u2019t it be nice to have an easy way to observe whether your counterparty has paid attention to all of the details of a complicated contract? As it turns out, the brown M&Ms served exactly this function. [. . .]<\/p>\n

Since Van Halen\u2019s (long) tour rider stipulated M&Ms with the brown ones taken out, the group knew that they needed to double check a lot of safety items for the show if they saw brown M&Ms (or no M&Ms, for that matter) in the backstage area. They also knew that they could feel comfortable that the contract provisions had been fulfilled if they saw a bowl of M&Ms with the brown ones removed. (I\u2019m pretty sure that trashing stuff was for some combined purpose of making the incident memorable and entertaining one\u2019s self.) This is pretty smart, since it\u2019s far more efficient to use this as a signal (the canary in the coal mine, in a way) rather than go around and check everything at each show. It\u2019s even smarter that the signal was crafted in the fashion of typical rock star douchebaggery so as to not arouse suspicion.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

What is it about Van Halen and their notorious demand for non-brown M&Ms in their contracts? It’s actually rather clever: Take Van Halen, for example. On the surface, the group is famous not only for its music but also for stunts such as trashing green rooms over the presence of brown M&Ms, and it\u2019s easy […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[831,9,28],"tags":[369,529,200],"class_list":["post-17593","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-business","category-law","category-media","tag-interesting","tag-lawyers","tag-music"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2hpV6-4zL","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17593","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=17593"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17593\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":17594,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17593\/revisions\/17594"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=17593"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=17593"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=17593"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}