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Comment by phkahler | Hacker News Reader

>> I will own my Personal Game. However, Amazon will not be constrained in its development of games or incur any liabilities by allowing me to develop and release Personal Games. Accordingly, I hereby grant the following license to Amazon to ensure that Amazon wilt never be liable to me for any Amazon work on games: I grant to Amazon a royalty free, worldwide, fully paid-up, perpetual, transferrable license to any and all of my intellectual property rights associated with the Personal Game and my Personal Game development.

WTF? No.

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"Amazon wilt [sic]..." this typo in the putative official contract quoted here and in the OP actually makes me suspicious that this is a true cut and paste of an official contract. Lawyers are many things but typo-prone is not generally one of them.

I also noticed the numerous typos in the contract; a couple within a single clause here:

> if its (sic) a PC game made available for sale, I will submit it for sate (sic) on the Amazon platform

I don't know if that's really evidence it's not a genuine Amazon contract, though. It could be that this was typed up based on a hard copy or something like that.

It was originally shared on Twitter as an image[1], and that version doesn't appear to include any typos I can spot (the "wilt", "its", and "sate" typos are certainly missing). I'm assuming TechRaptor OCRed the image, and that introduced the errors.

OCRing it via https://www.onlineocr.net/ produces some similar typos ("if its a PC game made available for sate, I will submit it for sate on the Amazon platform"; "Amazon wilt not [...] Amazon wilt never be liable"), so I'm guessing this or a similar tool was used and not fully cleaned up.

[1] https://pbs.twimg.com/media/E5pZWdNUcAAEc96?format=jpg

Edit: combined duplicate comment and added onlineocr.net

Ahh - that makes a lot of sense. Thank you. Can you link the image?

The link to the Twitter image is in the article near the top of the page.

https://twitter.com/james7132/status/1412540904225738753

disagree. have read many things handed to me by a lawyer, and typos and inconsistencies are something I have found regularly.

'Wilt' is an archaic version of the word 'will', frequently used in legal documents. "singular form of the present tense (indicative mood) of will"

Considering there are a number of other typos and `will' is used consistently everywhere else in the document, I think `wilt' is an error. Personally, I don't think I've ever seen the word used in that way in a legal document (in America--no idea if it's more common in the UK or elsewhere).

I totally agree that the credibility of the text is questionable. I just wanted to point out the use of 'wilt' is acceptable (in the UK).

In the future, all code will be written in the cloud for servers we never own or touch. Code will be generated by Copilot-like systems in browsers, turning us into Mechanical Turks. Because of this our salaries will drop below six figures.

We'll be tracked, and any work we do outside of our jobs to liberate ourselves will be copyrighted and carted off, never having contractually been ours to begin with.

Our sessions and employments can be killed at any time. Once you reach a certain age or have children, and your healthcare costs become a burden, you'll be terminated.

We own nothing. We rent everything. Our cars, our homes, our music, our movies are all on subscription.

We're becoming serfs.

The only way out is to build, but it's nigh impossible to compete with the Giants. Facebook will clone years of your work in a month with a team of twenty engineers.

The gravity well of modern computing.

On an intellectual level I know how often trends suddenly shift and how unpredictable the future is, and yet... this seems like such a plausible future path that it's pretty unsettling.

It's not really a WTF. In any disagreement about intellectual property, where some part of Amazon is working on a game and it happens to conflict with some other employee's personal project, Amazon wants all the leverage. It makes sense to have something that says "in a pinch, we're going to use what we use, even if you say it's yours".

If an employee expects to do something interesting or profitable with a personal project, then it's a "no", but it's not a WTF.

EDITED TO ADD: This is why we need laws that protect personal projects and make it impossible for companies to demand this. But in the absence of such restrictions on companies, they're going to set themselves up to win in any kind of dispute. It is not a WTF.

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