As a law prof, I have mixed feelings about this.
- On the one hand, as a piece of legal education, this post is brilliant and lovely.
- On the other hand, I wonder that it is just part of the regrettable tendency in the legal profession as well as the tech industry to take intellectual property as well as funny contractual-esque terms far too seriously.
The exemplar of point (2) is the Crockford clause (along with the discussion in this comment[1]). Nobody in their right mind would litigate this; there's no universe in which "use for good not evil" is actually a legally enforceable constraint. So what harm does it do?
Like seriously. Look at this[2] complaint:
Without a clear definition of “good” and “evil”, people need to seriously consider whether they are safe to use the code – because if the developer and users’ interpretations of the terms differ, there could be hell to pay. Would you want to ship a hardware device – let’s say you’re making a smart TV – and have some developer of a library send his lawyers around to tell you “sorry, TV rots kids’ brains, it’s clearly evil” to get your entire distribution channel shut down by injunction?
No. Just no, no, no. Find me a judge who is going to issue that injunction. Worrying about that is paranoid in a really unhealthy way. But, alas, we lawyers do that all the time, and that kind of worry is contagious, and we've spread it to everyone else, and it's just silly.
I find it really uncomfortable to think that there are people who are seriously like "THIS DOESN'T COUNT AS AN OPEN SOURCE LICENSE BECAUSE IT FORBIDS US FROM DOING EVIL." Like, really? What litigation are you actually imagining? The only way I can ever imagine someone with a Crockford clause actually convincing any court in any non-dysfunctional jurisdiction to award damages for copyright infringement for unauthorized evil use is if the use is so deeply unambiguously evil that copyright liability is by far the least of the unauthorized user's problem. I mean, we're talking about linting the JSON containing the list of the peoples to be genocided level of evil.
And, you know what? If you use JSLint to do a genocide, I hope Crockford does sue you.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19014052
[2] http://apebox.org/wordpress/rants/456
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