Zombies and Flesh-Eating Hordes: Amazon’s lawyers cater for an apocolypse.

As you would expect, Amazon is keen to avoid developers making use of the new service in situations which could give rise to serious levels of liability, and the “Acceptable Use” section of their terms and conditions makes it clear that Lumberyard is not intended for use with “life-critical or safety-critical systems”, such as the 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, there’s an important carve-out to this restriction, and readers who have persevered all the way down to clause 57.10 of the AWS Service Terms will no doubt be relieved to learn that the restrictions on use 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.”

…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.

It’s not entirely clear how this new game engine is going to help in the event of a full-blown zombie apocalypse, nor how developers could integrate Lumberyard (presumably on fairly short notice) into nuclear facilities or manned spacecraft in order to repel the flesh-eating hordes. However, Amazon’s lawyers will probably have other things to worry about in the event that the clause is activated (not least because there is no specific exclusion of liability for their other services, should the zombies attack).

Whilst it would be interesting to know how many users carefully considered the zombie clause before deciding to click on the “accept” button, it’s unlikely to be a big number. The problem here is the same one identified back in 2012 by researchers at Carnegie Mellon, who worked out that it would take 76 work days for an individual to read every privacy policy they encounter during the course of a year. Most people just aren’t reading these agreements, even though they can have a huge impact on liability and data privacy. The law on the incorporation of contractual terms, as it applies to digital content and services, may have some catching up to do…