iTunes may not be used as a weapon of mass destruction

When you use iTunes, please don't use it to make weapons of mass destruction, guide your nuclear missiles or inject a highly-virulent, 21st century bio-plague into the heartland of America. A EULA clause prohibits...

…including, without limitation, the development, design, manufacture, or production of nuclear missiles or chemical or biological weapons.

But it's okay to use iTunes to save lives, right? No.

The Apple software is not intended for use in the operation of nuclear facilities, aircraft navigation or communication systems, life support machines, or other equipment in which the failure of the Apple software could lead to death, personal injury, or severe physical or environmental damage.

Music of Mass Destruction [Freakonomics via, image the Apple Blog]

[#1 posted by anangbhai , June 25, 2008 5:20 AM]

"Mr. Jobs! Mr. Jobs! We just found out that Ach-nominnajad bought an Ipod at one of our stores when he visited New York.
What? Oh my gawd! He is SO BANNED from using the Itunes store. That'll show him. In fact the whole damn country is banned.
And that children is how the revolution (the new new revolution) happened."
Must be some extra-legalese thing to prevent them from being sued in case that type-o-shite does happen.

[#2 posted by joelphillips , June 25, 2008 6:09 AM]

I spent a hugely productive hour doing an analysis of something similar to this a few months ago.

In summary,

After about OS X 10.3, the only piece of Apple software that you can manufacture WMDs or nuclear technology with is the client version of 10.5, in English. Germans are allowed to manufacture nuclear technology, but not WMDs. The French aren't even allowed to manufacture nuclear techonology, which was maybe a bit shortsighted on Apple's part.

http://www.math.mcgill.ca/~phillips/blog/category/apple/

(Be gentle with the link, I'm not sure how much our webserver can take)

[#3 posted by Jake0748 , June 25, 2008 6:18 AM]

I've been seeing phrased very similar to these in Microsoft EULAs for years now. One of our customers complained that he was getting a bogus copy of Windows because he read all this weird stuff about life-support equipment, etc. in the EULA.

[#4 posted by Enochrewt , June 25, 2008 7:15 AM]

More proof that iTunes is stupid.

[#5 posted by Anonymous , June 25, 2008 7:48 AM]

The restriction on life-support or mission-critical applications is not new; it's standard boilerplate in the legalese section of any semiconductor data book back into the 1970s. They just don't want to get sued when you design (e.g.) a fetal heart monitor around their chips and your design fails.

[#6 posted by Mister N , June 25, 2008 8:50 AM]

this is a joke right..it's gotta be..I mean..are you freaking kidding me that they put that disclaimer?...no..really....

[#7 posted by joflow , June 25, 2008 1:14 PM]

Wow, way to catch up Freakanomics blog, Maddox commented on this well over a year ago: http://www.thebestpageintheuniverse.net/c.cgi?u=macs_cant

[#8 posted by Enochrewt , June 25, 2008 1:28 PM]

LOL I never thought I'd see a Maddox link make it onto BB. That's an especially good rant. But then they all are.

His book is pee-your-pants funny as well.

CROTCH PUNCH!