Is the term &quot;evil&quot; defined in law? An infamous clause found occasionally in software licenses is: The Software shall be used for Good, not Evil. This clause has been discussed in many places, including Software Engineering Stack Exchange and Open Source Stack Exchange. While a lot of people don't seem to like this clause, I wanted to step back and analyze the idea of &quot;evil&quot; from a purely legal perspective rather than the social milieu of the open source community. To that end, is the term &quot;evil&quot; a proper term in law with a distinct meaning? One idea I had was to interpret it as a synonym of &quot;unlawful&quot; or maybe &quot;criminal&quot;. The other idea is to understand it more in the sense of legal positivism, where socially-defined &quot;good&quot; and &quot;evil&quot; are distinguished from legally-defined &quot;lawful&quot; and &quot;unlawful&quot;, and so a particular act might be &quot;good&quot; but &quot;unlawful&quot; or &quot;evil&quot; but &quot;lawful&quot;. Neither of these definitions seems satisfactory. The problem I have with the first definition is that it adds unnecessary complexity to what should be more simply expressed as &quot;This software is not to be used for any unlawful purpose.&quot; or &quot;Committing any felony or gross misdemeanor with the software shall constitute a breach of the license agreement.&quot;. It also likely places someone who commits an unlawful act as minor as forgetting to add coins to a parking meter on the same level as a cackling comic book supervillain who gets off on bombing orphanages, which seems disingenuous. The problem I have with the legal positivism definition is that it empowers a court to define social rules, which it is not designed to do. For example, some people (based on their beliefs) might characterize using scheduling software to manage abortion clinic appointments to be an &quot;evil&quot; use (and thus a breach of the license), while others might take the opposite perspective and claim that using the same scheduling software to plan anti-abortion protests or manage the shifts of law enforcement officers investigating suspected clandestine abortion clinics are &quot;evil&quot; usages forbidden by the license. I'm interested in either an analysis of the meaning of &quot;evil&quot; in a general legal sense (in any jurisdiction in which the term might have been given a specific meaning or been interpreted by a court) or a sense restricted to software licenses, if such has ever been done. Discussion: As hinted at by respondents and commentators, I do see a distinction between acts that the vast majority of reasonable people would see as &quot;clearly&quot; evil such as ethnic cleansing, slavery, or rape and acts where the evil-ness or lack thereof is a valid point of debate, such as abortion, marketing habit-forming drugs, or not eating vegan. An answer might cover this. For example, is determination of whether a questionable act qualifies as evil a question of law for the judge or a question of fact for the trier of fact (e.g. jury)? Are the personal moral beliefs of the software licensor and/or licensee relevant? For example, if I have a personal moral belief (not shared by most of the members of my community) that eating at Burger King is evil because they buy from factory farms but I nonetheless use scheduling software with a &quot;no evil&quot; clause to schedule a lunch date at Burger King, am I in breach of the license? If the software's owner/licensor is a highly devout Catholic who considers any form of birth control to be pure evil but I (the licensee) disagree, is my act of using the software to facilitate an otherwise lawful condom purchase a breach? I do recognize that none of the situations I described above are likely to land me inside a courtroom due to practical matters. That is why my question is about the nature and definition of &quot;evil&quot; for legal purposes rather than advice for any specific situation, license, or use. I know what &quot;love&quot; means, but what does &quot;evil&quot; mean?
While not defined, in common law systems, there is a concept of Malum in se which can be translated to &quot;Wrong or Evil in itself&quot; and is used to describe criminal actions that are wrong because they are immoral as opposed to criminal actions that are wrong because they are prohibited (Malum Prohibitum). As an example, Murder is considered Malum in se while driving on the wrong side of the road is Malum Prohibitum. Malum in se thus is a crime because the action is immoral.
This case did not find that Two Live Crew's version was fair use. Rather it held that it could be fair use, contrary to the lower court ruling that its commercial nature precluded a fair use defense based on parody. The court remanded the case to be considered in light of its holding. The two parties settled without getting a final decision on fair use. It was never really contested that this work was parody. The issue was whether the commercial nature rendered it unfair. The Supreme Court told the lower courts to assess the taking under the full four-factor fair use analysis and that commercial use doesn't automatically make a parody unfair. One source of confusion is that you seem to be conflating parody and fair use. Parody is just one purpose (along with criticism, education, and others) that has been generally held to swing the balance in favour of fair use. Last, the "five word plagiarism rule" is not a legal standard.
Interesting question. I routinely write wills that authorize the executor to destroy property that has no significant economic or sentimental value, but I've never encountered a case where a testator or testatrix has directed that property be destroyed and I've never seen a reported case (or even a news report) in which that has happened. To the extent that an estate is solvent, there is no reason that a creditor could complain and if the destruction was done in a safe manner (as opposed to burning down a house or something like that without consulting the fire department) I'm not sure that there would be a public interest in doing so either. There are many religions that had a practice historically of burying someone with grave goods, so there are reasonable First Amendment freedom of religion arguments for allowing such a practice if it had a religious basis. And, if no interested party objected, I don't see how anyone could stop the executor from acting, unless the property to be destroyed was, for example, evidence of a crime, in which case it would be a crime to destroy it and the provision of the will would be void because it was a crime to carry it out. If an executor sought permission from a court to carry out this instruction, the court might require a public notice of the planned destruction to give notice to any third party who might claim an ownership interest in the property allegedly belonging to the decedent. On the other hand, usually, all interested parties in an estate can agree to act contrary to a will by unanimous consent, in which case no one would have standing to fight for the provision in court (unless it was considered a charitable bequest, in which case a state attorney general or an advocate appointed by the court with the "will" as the client could defend it). Given the strong public policies in the law disfavoring "waste" (i.e. useless destruction of property) such a provision could be held to be void as against public policy (similarly, bequests contingent upon marriage decisions are now void as against public policy).
The First Amendment does indeed guarantee the freedom to express any idea or viewpoint, the limitation being incitement to immediate lawless action, recently reaffirmed in Snyder v. Phelps (many free speech cases have been about criminal restrictions on speech, this applied even to a suit for intentional infliction of emotional distress). There isn't a clear line that distinguishes "advocating violation of the law" and "inciting to immediate lawlessness". Saying "(You should) shoot The Man whenever you see him" would be protected expression, but "There's a cop, somebody kill him" would be incitement. It also has to be a "credible" incitement, so saying "Kill him now!" to a room full of pacifist nuns would not constitute incitement. Things said to an angry mob would be more along the lines of incitement.
South Park did the EULA gag, and such an agreement would be unenforceable as unconscionable. NDAs, on the other hand, are conscionable, but a EULA isn't an NDA. There isn't a specific statute that you can point to that either makes such a no-criticism agreement explicitly legal vs. illegal, so the case would have to be based on common law justice-style arguments. People v. Network Associates is a relevant case, where a clause requires permission to publish benchmarks or reviews of the software. The court found against the publisher. However, the restrictive condition was not part of the license agreement, which included a merger clause that declared the license agreement to be the whole agreement. The publisher had some hand-waving about mention of "rules and regulations" which they argued nullified the merger clause, where the court did not accept the argument. So for the moment, you need to decide whether disparaging a product is that important to you; or, become a legal pioneer and win a case in court. There is a bill, the Consumer Review Freedom Act under consideration (passed the Senate) which might change that, if it becomes a law. It pertains to a written, oral, or pictorial review, performance assessment of, or other similar analysis of, including by electronic means, the goods, services, or conduct of a person by an individual who is party to a form contract with respect to which such person is also a party and restricts a contract with standardized terms— (i) used by a person in the course of selling or leasing the person's goods or services; and (ii) imposed on an individual without a meaningful opportunity for such individual to negotiate the standardized terms. which says that that kind of contract with that kind of provision is void.
In the vast majority of countries (both common law and civil law), statutes are interpreted in a manner that reflects the intend of the drafters of the statute a.k.a. legislative intent, when it is possible to reasonably determine what was intended. There is a canon of statutory interpretation in almost all legal systems that provides that absurd or nonsensical interpretations of legislative language are to be disregarded in favor of those that reflect the likely intent of the body passing the law, even if the literal and technical reading of the words does not state precisely what was intended. Thus, if there is a clear grammatical, punctuation, or spelling error and the intend meaning can be discerned from the language of the law, the larger context of the law, or extrinsic evidence such a legislative history and public discussion of the reasons for enacting the law in the first place, those clues will be used to interpret the legal effect of a law. Could this mean legal consequences or would I be safe as I &quot;bought nothing illegal&quot;? No. Ignorance of the law is no excuse even in cases where the interpretation of the law calls for the courts to ignore minor errors in legislative drafting. You would have an argument, but where you can state &quot;in fact 'Scolopendra gigantica' does not exist and they most likely meant 'Scolopendra gigantea'.&quot; The likelihood that you will face legal consequences is great. Also, in this particular example, keep in mind that biological species sometimes have more than one accepted Latin name, or once had a different name than the currently accepted name. For example, in this case, &quot;gigantica&quot; and &quot;gigantea&quot; are different grammatical inflections of the same Latin root word, and really are the same word in the same way that &quot;geese&quot; and &quot;goose&quot; are different tenses of the same word in English that refer to the same genus of birds. If a scientist discovers a new type of centipede and names it 'Scolopendra gigantica', would it be illegal immediately? The judges would look at all of the facts and circumstances and decide if the new species was within the scope of what the law intended to ban. But, the mere fact that the word is the same would not make the law apply to it. In the same way, suppose that a law had an exemption and didn't apply to animals in the town of Zootopia where many exotic pets are naturally common in the wild because a failed zoo released them into the area. But, given that context, the town of Euclid could not make itself exempt from the law by renaming itself Zootopia after the former town of Zootopia was disincorporated after its residents were all eaten by lions. If it was illegal to own a 'Scolopendra gigantea' due to that law and a scientist now names a new centipede 'Scolopendra gigantica' would that immediately legalize the 'Scolopendra gigantea'? No. For the same reasons discussed above. Footnote Re Similar Issues With Controlled Substances Laws This said, the issue you discuss does come up, and sometimes wins and sometimes loses, in the case of laws regulating controlled substances (i.e. illegal drugs). One of the reasons that this comes up is that the proper names of chemical substances in organic chemistry is not, as it is in biology, arbitrary. The name of an organic chemical is determined from looking at which atomic elements in which combinations with what kinds of bonds to each other are present. Given a chemical diagram of an organic chemical, every organic chemist would give it the same name, even if they've never discussed it, and likewise, you could ban an organic chemical that has never been observed or synthesized in real life and it would be illegal if it ever was synthesized. These statutes have usually been interpreted strictly to apply only to the named chemicals, but usually include an additional statutory section that either ban &quot;analog&quot; chemicals that are intended to or do have the same biochemical effect as the banned chemical, or allow an administrative agency to add new chemicals to the list without legislative action. Still, complications do come up even then because many lawyers and legislators become lawyers or politicians because they couldn't become doctors or engineers, because they flunked organic chemistry. (Joking aside, almost 50% of college students in the United States taking organic chemistry for the first time fail the course. This and first semester calculus are the most frequently failed college courses in the United States.) The Florida Cheese Ban For example, Florida recently classified a chemical present in many kinds of ordinary cheese as a controlled substance, which would in theory make every grocery store owner and millions of Floridians felons. Florida probably meant to ban high concentration synthetic extracts of that chemical administered as a drug, but didn't do anything to say so. But interpreting the statute to have that meaning was harder in that case since the same statute applies to many, many different drugs and the interpretation of the statute would make the ban on the chemical found in cheese make sense, would not make sense for the other drugs on the list. But, Florida courts may ultimately end up ignoring the addition of that chemical to the list based upon the canon against absurd interpretations, at least on an &quot;as applied&quot; case by case basis where the literal meaning of the statute would make millions of Floridian felons for violating this law. The Grand Junction Conviction For Possession Of A Legal Drug Another case came up in Grand Junction, Colorado where a woman was prosecuted by a government lawyer for possession of a controlled substance for possession of a chemical named in the indictment, and her government provided public defender had his client plead guilty to the crime. The woman tried to explain that this made no sense since its was an ordinary prescription drug, but the prosecutor, her own lawyer and the judge didn't believe her, and her public defender told her she was certain to be convicted anyway. (It isn't clear if she actually had a prescription for the drug, but even if she didn't, it wouldn't have been a crime.) So, she took a plea deal and was sent to prison to serve a medium length incarceration with work release sentence, instead of the medium length prison sentence she could have received if she went to trial, was convicted, and received a typical sentence for that conviction. The problem was that the chemical she was indicted for possessing in violation of the controlled substances act wasn't actually on the controlled substances list and wasn't an analog version of a controlled substance. There was also no reason to think that the drug he was convicted of possessing which had no pleasurable psychoactive effect was ever intended by the legislature to be banned or regulated. About a year later, in the year 2005, when this issue was ultimately discovered, a different criminal defense lawyer brought a post-conviction challenge to the conviction on the convicted woman's behalf, and the convicted woman was released with the conviction vacated, because the crime she was indicted for committing and convicted of didn't exist. Allysan Isaac, 24, was held nearly a year in work release for something that a judge said Tuesday was not even illegal. &quot;You were incarcerated for a case that was not a crime,&quot; said Mesa County District Judge Brian Flynn, who presided over the case. Flynn, the prosecutor and Isaac's defense attorney were unaware last year that the offense she was charged with was not a violation of the law. No one had noticed that a prescription drug found in Isaac's possession, an anti-anxiety medication called Buspirone, is not a controlled substance. ... District Attorney Pete Hautzinger said he had &quot;no idea&quot; why Isaac had been charged with and convicted of something that wasn't a crime. The defense attorney who represented Isaac in the first case was also baffled. &quot;I don't have an answer,&quot; assistant public defender John Burkey said. &quot;Nobody caught it. The police were saying it was a controlled substance.&quot; (Source quoting from and citing an article I read and confirmed the story from in the Rocky Mountain News, a now defunct newspaper. Corroborated here.) Incidentally, even though this woman was horribly wronged because of this wrongful conviction, the prosecutor and judge had absolute immunity from civil liability for the wrongful conviction, and criminal liability requires knowledge that you are committing a crime. The government likewise had no duty to compensate her for her wrongful incarceration because her rights weren't intentionally violated by anyone as required by civil rights statutes. She may have had a claim for legal malpractice against her own lawyer, for which negligence can be a basis of liability. Even that would have been a difficult case to win, however. This is because she would have to show that the public defender violated the standard of care of a reasonable lawyer by relying upon law enforcement's claim that a substance was a chemical banned by the controlled substances act which is a question of fact upon which expert witnesses could reasonably disagree. There is nothing in the public record to show that she pursued such a claim, but a private settlement reached before the case was filed wouldn't be revealed in that way. So, it is possible that a private settlement was reached in a legal malpractice case against her public defender that never actually resulted in a case being filed in court.
Short answer? No, the WTFPL offers no protection. A software license is a contract between the software vendor and the end user defining the terms and conditions under which the end user is permitted to use the software. Often, traditional software licenses contain terms that limit the vendor's liability. For example: "End User accepts the risk that this software will initiate computational conflagrations." It may also limit the end user's right to sue, by requiring binding arbitration, or by requiring them to sue in a particular court in a particular state. Whether and to what extent these clauses are enforceable is moot here, because the WTFPL doesn't contain them. Think of it this way. If you sign a contract with me to buy my house, and then you set fire to my car, you can't wave the house contract at me and say, "This is a legally binding contract, and it doesn't say I can't set fire to your car!" It doen't say that you can, either, and so it's not relevant to the lawsuit I'm going to bring against you for the damage to my car. Contracts are only relevant to a lawsuit if they contain a clause relevant to the subject matter of the lawsuit. The WTFPL contains no clauses in which the end user agrees to do or not to do anything, and therefore cannot be a defense against him or her doing, or not doing, anything at all.
Does using the courts in this way violate any law other than the individual sanctions for improper suits? Not really. Such an organization would probably have to be classified as some form of non-profit other than a 501(c)(3) in most cases, however, since politically motivated litigation usually doesn't qualify as a charitable purpose. In particular, is there any way to go after the money being fundraised for an activity that seems on its face to be of fraudulent intent? (I.e. filing cases with 0 chances of winning just to be able to dupe people into thinking their money can be used to help win an unwinnable fight?) No really. If they took money and spent it on the personal benefit of people related to the founders that might be fraud. This is essentially what happened in a non-profit purportedly established to help pay for a border wall. But using the money for a stated purpose of the entities that outsiders see as futile is probably not fraud or a violation of state regulation of entities that are not for profit. If there was such a way, would it be the state or federal government pursuing the case, or could any private actors have standing? A state attorney general's office generally has broad supervisory standing to confirm that entities which are not &quot;for profit&quot; are conforming to state law and their governing documents. Donors might have private causes of action for fraud if there were fraudulent misrepresentations made to secure funding that both the state AG and the Justice Department could also enforce criminally. But, the conduct described does not appear to be fraudulent.