Had it simply read "You may use this site for any purpose." or "You may use this site." or "You may use this" or "This can be used." it would have the same level actual restriciton in that you obviously aren't allowed to use it to break the law regardless of what it actually says.
And, having typed all that, I realize that there is another restriction in that it presumes that there is a 'you' using it. Things that are not 'you' cannot use it given that it specifically lists 'you' in the referenced parties. "This can be used" would be more permissive.
A sure sign of a legal team or possibly an entire legal system having lost the plot. Hopefully only the former.
Similar to the “Al Capone” instructions from the IRS:
>Income from illegal activities, such as money from dealing illegal drugs, must be included in your income on Schedule 1 (Form 1040), line 8z, or on Schedule C (Form 1040) if from your self-employment activity.
On the other hand, if you want to talk about these stickers all over Seattle saying you’re not allowed to conduct illegal activities on the premises…
For the majority of banks, they do not want people to conduct illegal activity via their bank. For the minority of banks which don’t mind it, nothing stops them from adding the clause anyways. A cartel bank probably cannot use the existence of the clause as a defense if they’re still allowing illegal activity.
If the purpose is to allow the bank to terminate accounts suspected of illegal activity, my assumption is they can already terminate for much less than that.
> You might look at the standard KYC questionnaire for a new retail account and think “Really? You ask questions which have obviously correct answers. You give people less than a tweet worth of space to answer them. How could this possibly catch any criminals not stupid enough to write Occupation: Drug Dealer?” […] this is not the only mechanism by which KYC questionnaires have a stochastic effect; they’re also useful in an entirely different part of the crime lifecycle. Many, many crimes involve lies, but most lies told are not crimes and most lies told are not recorded for forever. We did, however, make a special rule for lies told to banks: they’re potentially very serious crimes and they will be recorded with exacting precision, for years, by one of the institutions in society most capable of keeping accurate records and most findable by agents of the state.
> This means that if your crime touches money, and much crime is financially motivated, and you get beyond the threshold of crime which can be done purely offline and in cash, you will at some point attempt to interface with the banking system. And you will lie to the banks, because you need bank accounts, and you could not get accounts if you told the whole truth.
> The government wants you to do this. Their first choice would be you not committing crimes, but contingent on you choosing to break the law, they prefer you also lie to a bank. […]
> Particularly in white collar crime, establishing complicated chains of evidence about e.g. a corporate fraud, and mens rea of the responsible parties, is not straightforward. But then at some point in the caper comes a very simple question: “Were you completely honest with your bank?” And the answer will frequently be “Well, no, I necessarily had to lie in writing.”
> And congratulations, you have just eaten a wire charge fraud for every transaction you’ve ever done.
Bank 1 has the CYA clause and a cartel uses them for a decade for illegal purposes.
Bank 2 does not have the clause and a cartel uses them for a decade for illegal purposes.
In neither case does the clause prevent the illegal activity or make the bank any more or less aware of what customers are doing. They have to do KYC regardless of what the TOS says.
If you have actual measures (such as asking for source of funds and then asking for proof if the evidence looks incongruent with what was stated), you have no need for the silly question; if you don't, the silly question won't save you either.
This should go for both the asker and the subject of the question: Illegal things are already illegal. If a given legal system requires the silly question to be able to "tack on wire fraud charges" to something that would otherwise go unpunished(?!), I think what should be fixed is the legal system, not every single banking form.
https://gist.github.com/kemitchell/fdc179d60dc88f0c9b76e5d38...
My guess is that this is so they can ban any drug dealers from their site without consequence. "They violated our terms of service your honour!"
That means that things with "no license" don't actually mean "you can do whatever you want" - but in fact "you can do realistically nothing".
So to actually let other people so much as look at it, you have to have some kind of license attached already. And then it can be easy to imply (in the eyes of the law) things like "fitness for purpose" or some kind of warrenty unless expicitly denied.
Honestly it's really annoying to find things like code on the internet with "no license" - that just means you can pretty much never even look at it. You could argue that isn't the "right" default, but the law is what the law is right now.
But if you are paranoid you should speak with a lawyer in your jurisdiction.
"Do not iron clothes while on body" should not be required to not be found liable, but it does change the question in court from providing discovery for safety consideration, how comprehensive is the manual, how... and the costs involved with that to "Did the customer use the device in a way that was it was clearly labelled to not be used? Did any part of the product packaging or instructions contradict this warning? ...Dismissed".
Like, yeah it's illegal to do illegal stuff with or without the label, but at least Lysol could say "we did tell him that he can't use it for that."
Perhaps not. The law, as automatically applied, often include implied warranties.
Because the law applies - by that I mean if you don't put a disclaimer in then the law takes the view that you do provide a warranty, etc.
In either case it's illegal for me to use it for bad purposes, but how much I can blame on Windex depends on how much they let me know that I shouldn't do bad stuff with their products.
Publishing code without a license doesn't give it an "implicit all-rights-reserved license" - it's just illegal to copy because that's what copyright law says. A license is a conditional waiver of copyright law, a contract where the author promises not to enforce copyright against you if you fulfil certain conditions. (and this is legally binding so they actually can't enforce copyright against you)
It should be called bare-termsandconditions or minimal-termsandconditions.
It unintentionally demonstrates the limits of individual agency to avoid legal embroilments
That is to say: it doesn’t really matter what this person puts on their website because there is a judge and a sheriff somewhere that can force you to do something that would violate the things you wrote down because the things you wrote are subordinate to jurisdictional law (which is invoked as you point out)
It’s actually pretty poetic when you think about it because the page effectively says nothing because it doesn’t have content that the license applies to
If it’s a art piece intended to show something about licensure all it does is demonstrate the degree to which licensure is predicated on jurisdiction
DO WHAT THE FUCK YOU WANT TO PUBLIC LICENSE
TERMS AND CONDITIONS FOR COPYING, DISTRIBUTION AND MODIFICATION
0. You just DO WHAT THE FUCK YOU WANT TO.>Last updated: never
>No further pages. No hidden clauses.
Exactly the sort of cutesy language the LLMs use when they're trying to agree with you. "You got it! Here's a page with simple, easy to understand terms and conditions. No further pages. No hidden clauses. Nothing hidden behind another link."
I’m pretty sure this is already questionable in the EU.
There you go.
p.s. quick fix is "stop being lazy and move the single html off cloudflare"
I've heard of large organizations reaching out to places who use amateur T&Cs and licenses, saying "if we give you $X, can you dual license this as MIT, Apache, BSD, or hell anything standard?".
> Access is not conditioned on approval
Is this obvious enough legalese to not waste tens of thousands of dollars in legal fees if you get sued?
Note before you reply: I will not argue with you about how obvious it is. If you are actually a lawyer then it'd be interesting to hear your guidance, which I very much understand is not legal advice. If you're not a lawyer then I'm not.
I practice law in California. I've written terms of service that many, many people here on HN will have agreed to. I read this line and didn't know what it meant, or what it intended to mean.
That said:
> If you are actually a lawyer then it'd be interesting to hear your guidance, which I very much understand is not legal advice. If you're not a lawyer then I'm not.
There's no good way to validate lawyerdom on public social media like HN. And while the average lawyer probably remembers enough from law school or bar exams to know slightly more about Web terms of service and legal drafting than the average person, there's nothing to stop non-lawyers from reading up and learning. Eric Goldman's Technology & Marketing Law Blog is a great, public source covering cases on ToS and other issues, for example.
The Bar monopolizes representation within legal institutions. Don't cede the law itself to lawyers.
Legal training may be counterproductive to understanding this obviously non legal document.
I understand that it simply means that 'the thing' is public, and everyone has access. As opposed to access being granted explicitly to individuals.
The dumbest person can be right, but as a lawyer, your guess is much better.
I don't cede the law. It's just that if I find this unclear, then J Random Hn commenter's opinion wouldn't reduce my risk.
I won't be acting based on your opinion either, of course, but the quality of your reply is clearly in a different class from the other two.
It's not a requirement for a contract to be written by a lawyer, any more than a python script needs to be written by a professional coder. But in both cases the result tends to have problems. (skipping here how LLMs fit into this)
The way in which scripts and contracts can be "fixed" later are different, with no clever sound byte about just how these apples are different from oranges.
Good. Don't. Because it is exceedingly plain, if concise, English.
I don't think it says that at all. Because "accepting" is the right word for this interpretation, as you point out. "Approval" is a different thing altogether. You can accept something without approving of it -- that's the main message in the Serenity Prayer and hundreds of self-help books that try to reframe that message, maybe to help it sink in, maybe just to grift a little.
If it was literally spelled out as "Your access is not conditioned on your approval" that could almost be taken as a threat -- you will access this whether you want to or not.
> For instance, your access of the website is not contingent on the website operator approving said access.
To me, this is clearly what it says. "(Your) access is not conditioned on (our) approval."
But, of course, since you read it differently, I have to agree that perhaps it's not as clear as I thought.
However...
Contracts and agreements, if ambiguous, are always interpreted in a light most favorable to the party who didn't draft them.
So, absolute worst case (for the website owner), if we combine your reading and mine, it reads "Your access is not conditioned on either your approval of these terms, or our approval of you."
Somehow, I think the author is OK with this.
Did you see the actual lawyer saying they don't know what it means?
In any case, (a) it's not a request, and (b) if you truly want to control the narrative, then perhaps you should just do that from your own blog.
Of course even better is to simply have no explicit license, especially for something like code. Normal people can assume they can do whatever they'd like (basically, public domain). Lawyers will assume they cannot. The only thing stopping someone is their own belief in their self restrictions. i.e. you can use the thing if and only if you don't believe in my authority on the matter.
This is a terrible take. All it takes is a litigious jerk, and you could get bankrupt. And that jerk will be legally in the right.
Consider the war on drugs. Recreational marijuana is still highly illegal everywhere in the US, but there's businesses selling it that operate in plain view. How did we get there? Because people continued to point out how the law delegitimized itself until enforcement has started to become impossible.
If you want to follow Vaclav Havel's "Living in truth", then I commend you for it. But that's always a legal risk, and we're no longer talking about the law.
This is a terrible take. All it takes is an angry mugger, and you could get killed.
That's why your analogy doesn't work.
The Zen Koan of T&C's.
that this site definitely
does not, legally
Eventually, they wound up selling tickets to the match, and donated the proceeds to charity.
Now that's a civilized way to conduct a lawsuit.
Last updated: never
No further pages. No hidden clauses.
> 8. You are responsible for what you do, what you build, and what follows from either.
Or is this somehow meant to mean something else but worded so badly it can't be understood.
"Often one generation values things much more than others. Boomers and their wristwatches. One generation is like 'only from my cold dead hands,' the others 'what would I even need this for?!' What are examples of things the youngest generation did away with?"
If OP were a checklist, the answer would have checked every point.
Those are still terms and conditions!