I would get your organization's attorneys involved in this agreement, if you have not done so already.

This is very unusual and I have personally never seen such a stipulation in a contract. As noted by a previous poster, I would be very concerned about such language as it transfers the rights to the information to them, which means, to this non-lawyer, that they can do whatever they please with the content, since it now belongs to them. In this age of data privacy and identity theft, that is very concerning. It is also concerning because they could now choose to retain your records as their own for an indefinite period of time, which would be problematical if you have an expectation that the records will be destroyed. Arguably, if they do something bad, it would totally be their issue, since those records "belong" to them, but there is still black eye potential for Colonial Williamsburg.

The only rational reason that I can fathom for such language really has nothing to do with the bad stuff I described above. What they may be doing is establishing title over the shredded matter so that your organization can't come back and tell them that you want the money they get when it is recycled. It is possible that the recycler that they deal with has a stipulation that they will only take on material that has clear title (since many recyclers get metal items that has dubious provenance). May also be a local ordinance or state law somewhere that requires clear title to recycled materials and someone has simply interpreted it in an interesting way. Regardless, there should be some more elegant ways of handling that contractual language and I would suspect that your attorneys can work that out either with this vendor or another one.
 Patrick Cunningham, CRM
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