Warp wrote:
>   Check out Apple's standard usage license for eg. iTunes:
> http://images.apple.com/legal/sla/docs/itunes.pdf
> 
>   Especially check part 10 which ends with:
> 
> "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."
> 
>   I wonder how you could use iTunes to develop nuclear weapons. Unless
> they mean that you can't listen to music through iTunes while you are
> developing the weapons...

There are special exceptions in US law that restrict "freedom of speech" 
when it comes to exporting information about nuclear weapons. If you 
remember the whole PGP/Zimmermann thing from about 12 years ago where they 
classified encryption as "munitions", that's what it was all about.

I imagine A lot of the terms are there to make it "legal" for Apple to 
export iTunes. There's probably stuff in there about not using it for 
safety-critical applications, too, which means they get to sell it without 
going through an entire regulatory approval process (which they would need 
if they were selling, say, software to run an X-ray machine or a commercial 
jet aircraft).

Not saying it isn't silly, mind. But just explaining that there's good 
reasons it's in there, if you're the lawyer responsible for writing this. 
They can show the contract to the regulators and say "see? We don't have to 
wait for you to look at this."

Much of the law is like this, especially when based on precedent, where 
something some judge said 100 years ago gets copied verbatim into every 
contract written, even tho it's using terms nobody outside the legal 
profession have used in 50 years.

-- 
   Darren New, San Diego CA, USA (PST)
   Insanity is a small city on the western
   border of the State of Mind.

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