Discussion Groups / English Usage / November 2006

On 01 Nov 2006, Fiance wrote

No ambiguity to me: I read it as (a).

Whether that's legally enforceable is another matter -- it has the
ring of an expensive lawyer's bill to enforce it in court.

Fiance (or somebody else of the same name) wrote thusly in message
<1162417215.019304.220620@b28g2000cwb.googlegroups.com>:

Definitely (a) but I would put the apostrophe in a different place in the
original:

< "All information provided by Company A or its Distributor shall be
< treated as Company A's confidential information"

(I assume there is a typo here and it should read "Company A's
confidential information", not "Company's A confidential information".)

I think that all native speakers would naturally read it as (a). I
certainly would. The (b) reading is extremely unnatural. To avoid any
possibility of (b) you could say:

"All information provided by Company A or by its Distributor shall be
treated as Company A's confidential information."

If you want the (b) reading then the sentence would have to be reworked
as something like:

"All information provided by Company A, and the identity of Company A's
Distributor, shall be treated as Company A's confidential information."

No ambiguity, at least for all practical purposes and then some.

Yes.

No.  A pedantic person could argue that that is a possible reading, but
it's so unlikely to have been intended that it can safely be ignored.  
Were one to have intended that interpretation, one would have written
something like:

All information provided by Company A, and the identity of its
Distributor, shall be treated as Company A's confidential information.

Note also the "and" rather than "or" -- thinking about this further, I
think the "or" helps lead to the conclusion that "its Distributor" does
not mean "the fact of who its Distributor is".