From the department of curious legal precautions: Apple’s iTunes licensing agreement — which you have already agreed to if you’ve installed the latest version of the popular music software — contains a clause which prohibits anyone from using the program …
… for any purposes prohibited by United States law, including, without limitation, the development, design, manufacture, or production of nuclear missiles or chemical or biological weapons.
So Apple has got the WMD angle covered. But say you’re interested in using iTunes to run your new nuclear reactor?
Not so fast. A separate version of the iTunes license agreement warns that:
The Apple software is not intended for use in the operation of nuclear facilities, aircraft navigation or communication systems, life support machines, or other equipment in which the failure of the Apple software could lead to death, personal injury, or severe physical or environmental damage.
It turns out that this “nuclear clause” shows up in all sorts of unlikely places, from virus scanners to desktop weather readers.
Is this language as useful as a no-parking sign in front of a broken fire hydrant? Or do software lawyers know something we don’t about what our computers are capable of?
(Hat tip: New Scientist)
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The important thing to notice in here is this: terrorists are not allowed to listen to music playing in iTunes while developing mass destructions plans.
DRM could be useful. I know I’m against sharing nuclear material.
The foregoing comments are correct. There’s no good reason to leave out any kind of boilerplate disclaimer of liability from a EULA. An economic analysis might go like this:
Likelihood that software will be used to run a nuclear plant or develop WMD: very small.
Potential liability if software is used to run a nuclear plant or develop WMD: enormous.
Cost to insert disclaimer of liability in a EULA: $0.
For an investment of $0, you avoid an expected loss of enormous/very small.
Even if you accept that the risk is infinitesimal because iTunes couldn’t possibly be used in these ways, it’s still a costless precaution.
this is necessary- MacGuyver could start a nuclear reactor with itunes software and 3 paper clips
i… well i just thought that iTunes was for…ya know… to play tunes…
That’s boilerplate to adhere to US export control laws, specifically the Enhanced Proliferation Control Initiative (EPCI).
See:
http://www.aeanet.org/GovernmentAffairs/gaam0797_epcifactsheetJune01.asp
The bigger problem, which no one seems to have pointed out, is that these insanely long EULAs means that no one reads them. So, when a company sneaks nasty stuff in (like violation of your privacy, selling your info to some company, installing spyware on your machine, etc), no finds it among all the boilerplate nonsense.
It seems to me that they should be allowed to add a “yada, yada, yada” hyperlink to that common stuff, so the actual content could be easily read.
Software that runs nuclear safety systems in nuclear power plants have very tight NRC quality control rules. These rules protect Apple from being placed on some banned supplier list for all kinds of companies that deal with the nuclear energy supply chain. Employees of all the companies involved are also put on notice by those clauses. Whether anyone pays any attention to them or not is another matter.