Or my personal favorite, people who upload videos to youtube with the disclaimer "I don't own this video". I have no idea how that meme took hold, or how those people don't realize that it makes it worse for you if you admit to knowingly infringing copyright.
It is the mistaken belief that copyright simply protects the author's credit or attribution. Likely by people who drew their entire understanding of copyright from their schoolteachers' disapproval of plagiarism.
No, the US is the main country that loves these messages. Have you seen the size of universities or the government ? It's just clerical staff doing make believe work. Go to any .gov website. They'll throw up a wall of bs before you log in (e.g., https://ttp.dhs.gov/ ).
I used to read an Eastern European world traveler photoblogger who’d been to damn near every country (even a lot that most folks from even semi-developed countries would consider far too dangerous or boring to be worth going out of your way to visit—he’d surely been to at least 150 countries, several more than once) and according to him the specific behavior of posting regulations and signs all over the place is practiced nowhere as much as the US, with only Australia coming sort-of close.
I was a bit blind to it, being a born American, but once he pointed it out I can’t un-see it. The land of the free really does love posting regulations everywhere.
It's the sort of cultural blindness that comes with not being able to read the native languages in all 150 countries this person's claimed to have visited.
Once you're able to read a new language, you see all kinds of new signs, especially when you visit a new country.
It's like how people who only read English think of Japan as some kind of blissful artspace, when the reality is that it is far more overloaded with ads than Western countries. Your mind just processes it as abstractions because you can't read the language.
> in all 150 countries this person's claimed to have visited.
They had mountains of boring photos of traffic signs and fire hydrants and bollards and normal people on the street and in other public spaces living their lives and that kind of stuff in lots of countries, so I'm fairly sure they had been to them. :-)
I don't think their take was a result of blindness to languages they don't/didn't know—we really do seem remarkably keen on posting lots of regulations and restrictions at the entrance to every-damn-place, which I've noticed since he pointed it out. Other places may have those restrictions and one may well find a variety of laws and norms enforced in any of several ways in places with less regulation-posting, should one violate them—they're just (I gather—my own limited traveling supports his take, but I've only been to a few other countries) usually not quite as obsessed with posting lots of notices about regulations on every flat surface where strictly-public spaces meet slightly-less-public or private spaces. Since having it pointed out, I've noticed that I'm (when not thinking about it) ignoring a bunch of notices akin to a click-through EULA when just entering stores, and it's not hard for me to believe that lots and lots of places get by just fine, and not necessarily with fewer de jure and de facto restrictions on behavior, with far less posting of notices about those restrictions. Clearly it's not terribly necessary since I'm pretty sure most of us hardly pay any attention to it.
The European way is to post a gigantic wall of text like 1.5 by 1.5 meters with small letters and a full binding contract somewhere close to the entrance.
All US parking garages have exactly that and it's so weird. Nobody reads them (what, from your car before paying and entering? LOL, nobody even reads the smaller notices attached to the payment machines, nor half the text the displays print during an interaction) so all the work at writing, printing, and posting them is just a kind of weird secular-religion ritual.
Europe has its own version of this nonsense (GDPR cookie banners), but that stems from a different misguided belief. Europe believes that banners can affect markets. The US believes that banners can affect the law. Both are wrong.
But it seems unnecessary given the existence of its laws. For example, CFAA makes unauthorized use of a computer system illegal regardless of whether the system communicates it. Perhaps these messages originated prior to the CFAA, in which case perhaps they were necessary back then, and nobody has dared to remove them.
This is unlike trespassing in the US, however, which does require informing the person (written in a conspicuous location, or direct verbal conversation) they are unwelcome on whatever land they began accessing, and allowing them to promptly retreat, before any violation is committed. Access is generally permitted (e.g., to allow for unsolicited deliveries) prior to such communication.