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iTunes Prohibits Terrorism
Afforess writes "A recent closer look at the oft-skimmed EULA agreement for iTunes has an interesting paragraph in it, Gizmodo reports. 'You also agree that you will not use these products for any purposes prohibited by United States law, including, without limitation, the development, design, manufacture or production of missiles, or nuclear, chemical or biological weapons.' Although humorous, some readers suggested that this may be a defense measure to previously discussed price changes in the iTunes music store."
That language probably came right from the EULA for Mac OS X.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
"genius" mode made me want to kill the guy who designed it.
This has been in apple product license agreements for years. I first remember stumbling into it back in the summer of 2004, and I imagine its been in there for much longer.
http://www.aaronrogier.net
Seriously how old is this. These aren't recent changes it's been in there for a while.
It's a joke. Haha. Isn't it cool that at least someone at Apple has a sense of humor
As long as there are slaughterhouses, there will be battlefields.
I'm not sure terrorists are terribly concerned with the fine details of an EULA... could be wrong though.
Maddox already noted this 2 years earlier than the article in March of 2007: http://www.thebestpageintheuniverse.net/c.cgi?u=macs_cant
This has been around since itunes 4, or maybye even earlier than that.
I hope Apple doesn't enforce this provision too strongly.
I can't find it on google, but I recall hearing about some jail where they published a 'Prisoner Code of Conduct' that prohibited inmates from committing acts of terrorism. I though it was the most hilarious thing I'd ever heard, but I suppose if it were true someone would have posted something about it somewhere online.
Violating dozens of federal and local laws was one thing, but I for one do not want to run afoul of Apple's EULA!
Here it is in my pocket. And I'm not being suicide bombed right now, so you know it works.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Does that mean playing Amy Winehouse at a party is off limits?
Isn't it a bit of a leap to use the word 'terrorism' as shorthand for "missiles, or nuclear, chemical or biological weapons"? Missiles aren't even necessarily weapons.
When did "weapons development by those the United States doesn't like" become the definition of terrorism?
Property is theft.
Spoken like somebody who doesn't have access to the OSXapocalypse86 project's private tracker...
The idea that you'd use OS X for something as serious as missile development / nuclear simulations is laughable.
Laugh all you want, but there are a lot of Mac users at Lawrence Livermore and Los Alamos. They use Xgrid.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
I would imagine it has something to do with the export regulations on strong cryptography, something they probably use in their DRM code.
"oft-skimmed EULA agreement" goes to a Gizmodo article.
"interesting paragraph" goes to the whole EULA with no PDF warning.
I assume Gizmodo reprints the EULA in its entirety, while the EULA itself is made up of one interesting paragraph? Or am I supposed to figure out which is the interesting one myself? Here's a novel, I think you'll find one of the passages there very entertaining.
I mean, I was ready to complain when I couldn't tell which was the main link and which were merely supporting materials. But this is just pure shod. That is to say, it's like shod in a way, shoddy, shod-like.
I suppose I should start complaining about those, so that people will be a bit self-conscious about submitting actual targets of ricicule like this one.
Fact is they talk about using XGrid.
They're still running their non-standard FORTRAN with dependencies on compiled binaries from companies that went under for architectures that don't exist anymore except under emulation.
All those Mac users are running Terminal.
"There is nothing nice about Steve Jobs and nothing evil about Bill Gates." - Chuck Peddle
So as the plane was about to fly into the WTC, it miraculously swerves and avoids it. The hijackers voice comes over the PA system: "Passengers, We have just realized that the act we were about to perform would violate our iPod EULA. We may be foaming at the mouth islamofacists, but we're passionate about quality as well. We will return you to the airport and hijack a bus to the nearest Apple store."
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2009/02/13/iphone_taliban/
Somebody actually read the EULA, I simply thought it was an old design tradition. Just write a big block of text and include a "Next" button. Variants may include clicking one or more checkboxes.
Knowledge is power. Knowledge shared is power lost.
Terrorist #1: Hey, did you read the EULA for this thing?
Terrorist #2: No. Why?
Terrorist #1: All the more reason to bomb them into the Stone Age. Here we are, building a nuclear weapon, and those crazy Americans are sweating the LEGAL ramifications.
Terrorists around the world were heard saying: "Curses, foiled again..."
Best "String" Ever!
They'll have to just scrawl their taunts on the sides of the bombs with chalk, rather than have them embellished with beautifully proportioned females and flaming decals.
Oh hell, who am I kidding, they can just use wingdings.
...I mean the itune's EULA thing has been talked about since a very long time... I don't see how this is news... is so old.
... to run it on mission critical medical equipment?
8==8 Bones 8==8
LLNL and LANL are both sites of large IBM Linux clusters. You're right, AC, if they are use XGrid, it's not as their primary sim platform.
My blog
American weapons don't scare Americans (they should, but they don't), therefore their usage doesn't count as terrorism.
Rampant carbon sequestration destroyed the Dinosaurs' tropical paradise. I'm here to help repair the damage.
I'm pretty sure you don't have to be running "Super Futuristic Movie OS" with a "Design Nucular Missile System" button in order to work on missile development. Any OS that can run a CAD program (I'm taking a wild guess here and saying that's "all of them") will do just fine.
Rampant carbon sequestration destroyed the Dinosaurs' tropical paradise. I'm here to help repair the damage.
1. and 2. are the same thing, especially if you have "1.5. Buy cutesy iPod brand loudspeakers."
Rampant carbon sequestration destroyed the Dinosaurs' tropical paradise. I'm here to help repair the damage.
I somehow feel that terrorists would not want to pay for a license from Microsoft or Apple. And even a pirated version of Windows would make them very nervous everytime automatic updates ran, would you like your system connecting to an American company's servers when American Predator drones are flying overhead waiting for intelligence on your location. I guess you could run Windows unpatched, but that's just going to make suicide bombers press the detonator early. Linux has a more international flavor, which would appeal to the global jihadist.
Maybe I'm wrong and Osama has an iBook.
Laugh all you want, but there are a lot of Mac users at Lawrence Livermore and Los Alamos.
Are you implying that the US goverment is violating Apple's EULA?
Clauses like these are usually more about liability than anything else. ("No, your honor, the murderer did not have a legal license to use our handgun because it is licensed, not sold, and using the weapon to kill another person is a violation of the terms of the EULA.") In light of the recent Kurdish lawsuits, I can see why such a clause would be prudent. Sure, one of those recent suits is about a chemical that is classified as being a chemical weapon in and of itself, so shipping that to Iraq was clearly bad. However, a second suit is about lab equipment that could presumably have a wide range of uses from something as dangerous as a chemical weapons manufacturing facility all the way down to something as benign as a high school chemistry class.
If product manufacturers are at risk of being held responsible for the idiotic and even malicious use of ordinarily benign products, it stands to reason that these sorts of clauses will pop up more and more frequently. What that has to do with iTunes, I have no idea. Maybe they're afraid somebody will use a visualizer to distract New Yorkers while they are being mugged.... :-D
But seriously, I'm with John on this one. That clause has been in the Mac OS X EULA for ages, so they're probably just trying to reduce the number of unnecessary differences between their EULAs.
Check out my sci-fi/humor trilogy at PatriotsBooks.
I know a lot of researchers who develop on macs and run their simulations on some off-site computer. Just because you happen to be using a BlueGene from IBM to do your number crunching doesn't mean you have to use a Lenovo laptop. Also, the tone of your message implies that you wouldn't use OS X for "serious" work. I would if I had the cash -- xgrid is really cool, but mac servers are a bit dear.
Languages aren't inherently fast -- implementations are efficient
All those Mac users are running Terminal.
Hey genius, could it be that _ALL_ UNIX admins spend most their time in a terminal, be it putty, gnome-terminal, or Terminal, and gnome-terminal sucks so much ass people would rather use a NonFree(tm) system just for a better terminal emulator?
Answer: Yes
Sorry to be so harsh, but trying to devalue OS X because a subset of users spends most their time in a terminal is just bat-shit insane. Did you consider what most Linux desktops are doing?
'You also agree that you will not use these products for any purposes prohibited by United States law, including, without limitation, the development, design, manufacture or production of missiles, or nuclear, chemical or biological weapons.'
Does this mean the DMCA extends to all users of iTunes? Or does it only mean that you can't use iTunes to circumvent technology that prevents or controls access and copying?
Does this make it illegal to rip CDs? Before the intarnets and CD burners, having the music only available on a physical object that you couldn't copy was effectively a copy prevention technology.
The latter is probably a far-fetched interpretation; but look at RIAA lawyers---far fetched seems to fit well inside their modus operandi. On the other hand, if you're outside the US, do you have anyone that are quite as aggressive whom you need to fear?
Does this inclusion of US law also include US case law? Does this make it illegal to use iTunes to produce and sell coffee that's unduly hot (unless it says so on the cup)?
Anyone knows some cases dealing with similar wordings which "exports law"?
You can't build missles with iTunes. Fair enough, but what kind of missles? Say I am working on an amateur rocket, one of the simple kits you used to be able to buy and I listen to my iPod (not that I got an iPod, I got an iRiver all the cool of the small i in front without the cost) am I in violation?
Is iTunes banned for NASA? Note that the language states things US laws forbids INCLUDING work on missles, this reads as including legal work on missles.
EULA's, yet another sign lawyers should be shot. Why people need another sign I don't know, the sheer fun of it should be enough for any red blooded male.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
Interesting question, although, as far as I can tell, EULAs are still relatively hotly contested in and of themselves as being a legally binding agreement.
As a side-note, I'm not sure you made it very clear, but I think what you were trying to say is that it has no effect on US users (in order to be in breach of the EULA, the user has to be already breaking the law), it only has an effect in countries where the EULA holds as a binding agreement, but laws are different. The best example I can think of this is (probably) Canada, where filesharing is legal, and comes under fair-use (I believe). However, in the US, this constitutes copyright infringement, and is against the law. That means a Canadian who has perfectly legally acquired music in their country who uses iTunes is in breach of the EULA.
If I'm wrong, sorry, I'm not trying to put words in your mouth, but it's an interesting point regardless.
I stand corrected, I am not really up to speed on the subject of the virality of the GPL. I just wanted to use an example that would appeal to Slashdot readers.
beauty is only a light switch away
http://news.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=09/04/10/1320211&art_pos=3
Wasn't this added in after the PR nonsense about the G3 being classified as a "supercomputer?"
Sometimes, life itself is sarcasm...
http://www.apple.com/science/profiles/colsa/
I used to work on this project (not at colsa, at an academic research institution. We were also funded by the same Army researcher's project). We had a mini version of Mach5, and the folks at Colsa built that to run his simulations. OS X was not an idea OS for a large cluster, but we made it work. Many of the GUI workgroup management tools did not scale to hundreds or thousands of hosts.
I still think we ended up with Apples is because the researcher for the Army was a big Mac fan, and used OS X for his laptop and workstation. I had wanted a standard x86 cluster at the time (our first generation cluster for the project was x86 w/Linux). Anyway, I ended up an Apple "guy" and continued using it when I left that group and took a job writing software at a cancer research laboratory.
I suspect this clause appears in the OS X eula (i never read it), but I used to work for a project funded by the US Army to develop HPC technology to support one hypersonic missile researcher. He was a Mac guy, and eventually we became Mac people. Anyway, now I'm working at a cancer research laboratory, and still using OS X (although all my computationally intensive stuff runs on my Linux cluster - I use OS X for my workstation where I prototype/develop and then move over to the cluster when I need to run big computations (hundreds/thousands of CPU/hours)
I guess that will stop the terrorists! I'd hate to be in their shoes now.
That is all.
[C]ould it be that _ALL_ UNIX admins spend most their time in a terminal, be it putty, gnome-terminal, or Terminal, and gnome-terminal sucks so much ass people would rather use a NonFree(tm) system just for a better terminal emulator?
Yeah, I sorta do that. One of the main reasons is that I've found that an OSX Terminal is one of the few that can actually allow me to edit text that's in a mixture of languages, because it works better than others I've tried with UTF-8 encoded text. TextEdit also works pretty well for non-Western languages, though as an editor it's sorta clumsy.
Granted, it still has a problem with occasionally deciding that Russian text is all double-width characters, and cursor tracking for Hebrew and Arabic is quite weird. But if there's a way to do it on my linux boxes, I haven't stumbled across it yet. Most of the terminal-window apps seem to draw Hebrew and Arabic left-to-right, and mostly they only display the isolated forms of Arabic letters. We have a long way to go ...
If there's something that works as well as the Mac's Terminal, let me know. And yes, I've looked into doing it myself, but so far the charset/font stuff on both linux and OSX are pretty much brick walls. Asking questions in various forums mostly gets no response at all, with "RTFM, n00b!" being a close second (without clues for where to find TFM, of course).
(It'd also be nice to have linux apps that're functionally like the Mac's Character Palette and Keyboard Viewer, though it's easy to think of a number of ways that those could be improved. But I guess we're still in the days of convincing the vendors that they need to support western European languages. Non-European languages are still beneath their notice, even if they do get all their hardware from east Asia. ;-)
Those who do study history are doomed to stand helplessly by while everyone else repeats it.
Laugh all you want, but there are a lot of Mac users at Lawrence Livermore and Los Alamos.
Are you implying that the US goverment is violating Apple's EULA?
Are you implying the US government is violating United States law?
Lars T.
To the guy who modded me down from perfect to terrible Karma - Apple haters still suck
... but I can still use short clips of Kylie Minogue's 'Can't Get You Out Of My Head' as a personal defence sonic stun weapon, right?
You are not a brain: http://books.google.com/books?id=2oV61CeDx-YC
This is just a legal disclaimer because iTunes includes algorithms that may be listed as dual-use items, similar to "strong" cryptography.
Are you implying the US government is violating United States law?
Implying? No - but I'm certainly thinking it very loudly.
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You see, its a not too well known fact that you can create atomic bomb simulations by writing iTunes visualizer plugins. The better your design, the bigger the explosion on the screen.
And interestingly enough, all modern US atomic weapons license House of Pain's "Jump Around" directly from iTunes ... something about a timing dependency, I'm not sure.
Now the rumor that the whole US economy can be modeled with a secret visualizer run against "Bohemian Rhapsody" is just crazy.
-- I browse at +5 with stripped sigs
The reason why they did this is because of all of the crazy people out there that are trying to tie every political dignitary, and booming company to terrorism. For some reason there are people out there that can't get their heads around the fact that there can be good, successful people and companies that aren't backed by some terrorist group. Sad, huh?