A sure sign of a legal team or possibly an entire legal system having lost the plot. Hopefully only the former.
Similar to the “Al Capone” instructions from the IRS:
>Income from illegal activities, such as money from dealing illegal drugs, must be included in your income on Schedule 1 (Form 1040), line 8z, or on Schedule C (Form 1040) if from your self-employment activity.
On the other hand, if you want to talk about these stickers all over Seattle saying you’re not allowed to conduct illegal activities on the premises…
For the majority of banks, they do not want people to conduct illegal activity via their bank. For the minority of banks which don’t mind it, nothing stops them from adding the clause anyways. A cartel bank probably cannot use the existence of the clause as a defense if they’re still allowing illegal activity.
If the purpose is to allow the bank to terminate accounts suspected of illegal activity, my assumption is they can already terminate for much less than that.
Bank 1 has the CYA clause and a cartel uses them for a decade for illegal purposes.
Bank 2 does not have the clause and a cartel uses them for a decade for illegal purposes.
In neither case does the clause prevent the illegal activity or make the bank any more or less aware of what customers are doing. They have to do KYC regardless of what the TOS says.
If you have actual measures (such as asking for source of funds and then asking for proof if the evidence looks incongruent with what was stated), you have no need for the silly question; if you don't, the silly question won't save you either.
This should go for both the asker and the subject of the question: Illegal things are already illegal. If a given legal system requires the silly question to be able to "tack on wire fraud charges" to something that would otherwise go unpunished(?!), I think what should be fixed is the legal system, not every single banking form.
> You might look at the standard KYC questionnaire for a new retail account and think “Really? You ask questions which have obviously correct answers. You give people less than a tweet worth of space to answer them. How could this possibly catch any criminals not stupid enough to write Occupation: Drug Dealer?” […] this is not the only mechanism by which KYC questionnaires have a stochastic effect; they’re also useful in an entirely different part of the crime lifecycle. Many, many crimes involve lies, but most lies told are not crimes and most lies told are not recorded for forever. We did, however, make a special rule for lies told to banks: they’re potentially very serious crimes and they will be recorded with exacting precision, for years, by one of the institutions in society most capable of keeping accurate records and most findable by agents of the state.
> This means that if your crime touches money, and much crime is financially motivated, and you get beyond the threshold of crime which can be done purely offline and in cash, you will at some point attempt to interface with the banking system. And you will lie to the banks, because you need bank accounts, and you could not get accounts if you told the whole truth.
> The government wants you to do this. Their first choice would be you not committing crimes, but contingent on you choosing to break the law, they prefer you also lie to a bank. […]
> Particularly in white collar crime, establishing complicated chains of evidence about e.g. a corporate fraud, and mens rea of the responsible parties, is not straightforward. But then at some point in the caper comes a very simple question: “Were you completely honest with your bank?” And the answer will frequently be “Well, no, I necessarily had to lie in writing.”
> And congratulations, you have just eaten a wire charge fraud for every transaction you’ve ever done.
https://gist.github.com/kemitchell/fdc179d60dc88f0c9b76e5d38...
My guess is that this is so they can ban any drug dealers from their site without consequence. "They violated our terms of service your honour!"
But if you are paranoid you should speak with a lawyer in your jurisdiction.
"Do not iron clothes while on body" should not be required to not be found liable, but it does change the question in court from providing discovery for safety consideration, how comprehensive is the manual, how... and the costs involved with that to "Did the customer use the device in a way that was it was clearly labelled to not be used? Did any part of the product packaging or instructions contradict this warning? ...Dismissed".
Like, yeah it's illegal to do illegal stuff with or without the label, but at least Lysol could say "we did tell him that he can't use it for that."
Perhaps not. The law, as automatically applied, often include implied warranties.
Because the law applies - by that I mean if you don't put a disclaimer in then the law takes the view that you do provide a warranty, etc.
In either case it's illegal for me to use it for bad purposes, but how much I can blame on Windex depends on how much they let me know that I shouldn't do bad stuff with their products.
Publishing code without a license doesn't give it an "implicit all-rights-reserved license" - it's just illegal to copy because that's what copyright law says. A license is a conditional waiver of copyright law, a contract where the author promises not to enforce copyright against you if you fulfil certain conditions. (and this is legally binding so they actually can't enforce copyright against you)
That means that things with "no license" don't actually mean "you can do whatever you want" - but in fact "you can do realistically nothing".
So to actually let other people so much as look at it, you have to have some kind of license attached already. And then it can be easy to imply (in the eyes of the law) things like "fitness for purpose" or some kind of warrenty unless expicitly denied.
Honestly it's really annoying to find things like code on the internet with "no license" - that just means you can pretty much never even look at it. You could argue that isn't the "right" default, but the law is what the law is right now.
Had it simply read "You may use this site for any purpose." or "You may use this site." or "You may use this" or "This can be used." it would have the same level actual restriciton in that you obviously aren't allowed to use it to break the law regardless of what it actually says.
And, having typed all that, I realize that there is another restriction in that it presumes that there is a 'you' using it. Things that are not 'you' cannot use it given that it specifically lists 'you' in the referenced parties. "This can be used" would be more permissive.