AWS Service Terms: the clause 42.10 | Hacker News Reader

AWS Service Terms: the clause 42.10

aws.amazon.com

116 pointslogronoide36 comments

> 42.10. Acceptable Use; Safety-Critical Systems. Your use of the Lumberyard Materials must comply with the Acceptable Use Policy. The Lumberyard Materials are not intended for use with life-critical or safety-critical systems, such as use in operation of medical equipment, automated transportation systems, autonomous vehicles, aircraft or air traffic control, nuclear facilities, manned spacecraft, or military use in connection with live combat.

> However, this restriction will not apply in the event of the occurrence (certified by the United States Centers for Disease Control or successor body) of a widespread viral infection transmitted via bites or contact with bodily fluids that causes human corpses to reanimate and seek to consume living human flesh, blood, brain or nerve tissue and is likely to result in the fall of organized civilization.

Unfortunately, if the infection is bacterial, amoebic, or prionic in nature, you'll still have to use something else.

Even more unfortunately, there is no “US Centers for Disease Control” (there is a US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, which typically uses an acronym in which the “and Prevention” is not represented) so the certification condition can never be met.

Surely a reasonable court would say that it's very clear what they meant?

I think many a real court would (however much it conflicts with certain idealized views of court operation) in different ways depending on whether the issue before it was Amazon seeking to exclude the use as unauthorized as a basis for breach (either seeking damages or seeking to avoid damages for cutting off the entity using the software in a CDC certified zombie invasion) or the some other party seeking to use the fact that it was an authorized use of Amazon software to make a product liability claim against Amazon for harms resulting from such use.

In fact, if something like that actually happened, it's likely a court would interpret "viral" more in the sense of "going viral" -- i.e., something that spread widely and quickly, as opposed to something that was spread specifically by a virus.

This is the kind of "bug" that I would expect matters in smart contracts, but is easily treated by a court (the ultimate interpreter of a contract) as meaning being perfectly clear, and therefore is not a problem.

IANAL, though.

At least in smart contracts (in a world where everything would be smart contracts), you could bind the association to a UID for the right entity, so it couldn't be fooled by setting up a organization with exactly the same name in order to fool humans.

I do like anal.

You could, but it would likely be against the intent of the contract. Note that it also mentions "or successor body". So a smart contract would still be worse in this scenario.

For this kind of event I don't think it's possible to define what "successor body" means. If the US government falls, is the "New United States" body "US Centre of Disease Control" a successor body? If CDC (and its private keys) gets nuked as part of containment, is the spinoff "US Centre of Zombie Prevention and Control" the successor? Maybe. Depends how the role of CDC was split up in the new world.

Is it an easy question? No. A court will likely have a hard time doing the right interpretation. But with smart contracts it instead becomes impossible to achieve the goals intended by all parties involved in making the contract.

(Of course laws can be enacted and dictate a given interpretation, too, saying e.g. that any contract clause preventing use by the military against zombies is void)

And so it goes for all smart contracts. A smart contract can bring back slavery. But slavery is illegal. Now what?

> So a smart contract would still be worse in this scenario

Not necessarily, contract could be made to accept "claim" from either UID matching exactly X, or where inheritsFrom/inheritsTo is set to UID Y. Just has the court would have to think about the right interpretation, a contract would have to think about the right implementation. Sure, both of tradeoffs, but such is the world.

> A smart contract can bring back slavery

How exactly? Slavery is something physical, smart contracts only deal with concepts in the digital realm.

> from either UID matching exactly X, or where inheritsFrom/inheritsTo is set to UID Y.

I already gave the example where the US government has fallen, and "New United States" does not inherit from US government.

> Just has the court would have to think about the right interpretation, a contract would have to think about the right implementation

My point here is that not everything can be foreseen. Not even every mistake in the contract can be foreseen. And that is why it's more important to be able to make these interpretive decisions after the new information comes in, and not be tied to a codification made on bad or incomplete data cementing an interpretation no party wanted, and no person would ever think was the intention or even common-sense interpretation.

In any case all smart contracts contradicting actual contracts or laws are moot. Say a smart contract says that Amazon can't sell to nuclear plants. There's absolutely no way for a smart contract to prevent this.

Even if 100% of the economy was transacted on the same blockchain there would be nothing stopping Amazon giving software to a nuclear powerplant and that nuclear powerplant sending them money. At most they'd have to create a subentity, like an ice cream truck, that they buy one ice cream from, for $10M.

Hell, the nuclear plant could reclassify itself as an ice cream truck.

It's not the ink in the contract, nor the code in the smart contract, that prevents breach. It's the law and legal system. Because ink and code can't.

> Sure, both of tradeoffs, but such is the world.

I don't think there is a tradeoff. At best a smart contract is more efficient. But in order to actually be useful it needs to be overridable.

Just like how a handshake deal or verbal contract is more efficient. But we all agree that courts decide. You can't make a handshake deal and expect courts to say "well, slavery is illegal, but their palms touched so there's nothing I can do".

Handshake is more efficient than smart contract, and as long as everything goes 100% according to plan a smart contract is more effective at execution/enforcement. But when it inevitably goes wrong it's many orders of magnitude harder to fix.

Children and some mentally disabled people cannot legally enter contracts. Smart contracts will never be able to codify these things either. Smart contracts are completely missing the point about what's hard about contracts, and instead make things worse.

> Slavery is something physical, smart contracts only deal with concepts in the digital realm.

A person's ownership over another can be on the blockchain. In this scenario Amazon's ability to sell software or service to certain customers is on the blockchain.

Why is one more real than the other?

The "Center for Disease Control and Prevention" was previously the "Center for Disease Control", although I don't know if the rename makes it a "successor organization".

Examples: ophiocordyceps [0,1] is a fungus, and toxoplasmosis [2,3] is a single-celled eukaryote. I've commented this before: this is a loophole in the ToS.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15651231 ("'Zombie ant' brains left intact by fungal parasite")

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ophiocordyceps_unilateralis

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15376654 ("Rage Disorder Linked with Toxoplasmosis")

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toxoplasma_gondii

That is clearly a joke, which begs the question, what else in this contract is a joke? How is an uneducated man to know the difference?

One does not need to know the difference. It being entertaining does not change the enforceability.

Having worked in a middle sized company with a bunch of lawyers on payroll, I am starstruck how someone got something like this in at a gigantic corporation like Amazon. I'd imagine this to have taken weeks at best. Unless it was the idea of a high level executive of course.

"What if we allow it in case of Zombies?"

"Are you serious? Zombies?"

"Well, they say COVID was made in a lab. What other crap do they have in those labs? Better safe than sorry."

"Yea, true."

More like:

PR department: "People think Amazon corporate are like drones and we're no fun, people are leaving because we sometimes prioritizes profits over human-life, what can we do about it?"

Legal team: "Lets pretend that there can be a zombie apocalypse in our legal terms, easter eggs like this will surely make people forget about all that grim stuff"

Yeah that's more likely

Or "no one is going to read this shit anyway, let's make a hilarious funny in paragraph 42.10 and no one will notice that you're promising your first born to Jeff Bezos in 43.1.1.2.5. We're running out of virgins for his daily rejuvenation bath"

Or "As part of our recruitment process in the legal department we require candidates to read and understand our terms of service in full."

For the lazy:

I remember when AWS released Lumberyard and a commenter on HN pointed out the zombie clause. This joke rewards those who reads the fine details.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24636281 ? "Amazon mentions zombies in their Terms of Usage", by supernihil on Sept 30, 2020.

Was this a Brown M&Ms moment, a trap setup for the lawyers, and simply got through? Or just a sign of how human and laugh a minute Amazon Corporate really is underneath it all?

When I joined AWS in 2017, at some point in your first month you’d do a week long induction program. A cavalcade of rather dry summaries and presentations from different functional areas alongside The usual onboarding and “how stuff works here” educational sessions.

The legal team were easily the highlight. Such an incredibly entertaining group. Literally the only session I remember after all these years too.

You really have to admire the level of gameplay at AWS. At one stroke:

1. They created a recurring viral (pun not intended) marketing meme.

2. They gained credibility with game devs.

3. Boosted team spirit.

They gained credibility with game devs.

Did they though?

What "viral marketing meme" are you talking about, a funny clause in their legal text? Seems like that's a one-time thing mostly, which most people will see through as a marketing gimmick to try to seem less sterile than what the organization is in real-life. I don't see how this can lead to either more credibility with game developers nor boosting the team spirit, both of those are driven by building a really good product that is useful for people (in this case game developers), which judging by the actual product page, it's not really there yet. Until then, credibility will remain where it's at, and so will the team spirit. Don't let one paragraph from the legalese confuse you.

Glad to know that in such a catastrophical event, the military at least got permission to use Amazon Lumberyard for live combat.

During a zombie outbreak, how important is cloud access, really?

Lumberyard isn't cloud. It's a game engine and it sounds like it is not designed to be 100% robust, hence it shouldn't be used in critical situations.

I found out about this from my mother. It seems this is being circulated within the boomer conspiracy theory circles. It's funny for people who get the joke, but they have no idea what "Lumberyard Materials" could be. It sounds really scary to them.

Why are they so sure zombies wouldn't sue them? Also, is the zombie market that big it deserves a explicit mention in the ToS?

Well that rules out the Cordyceps infection from the Last of Us

Seems reasonable. Fairly standard clause I’d think.

Zombies are the lowest form of horror.

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