I practice law in California. I've written terms of service that many, many people here on HN will have agreed to. I read this line and didn't know what it meant, or what it intended to mean.
That said:
> If you are actually a lawyer then it'd be interesting to hear your guidance, which I very much understand is not legal advice. If you're not a lawyer then I'm not.
There's no good way to validate lawyerdom on public social media like HN. And while the average lawyer probably remembers enough from law school or bar exams to know slightly more about Web terms of service and legal drafting than the average person, there's nothing to stop non-lawyers from reading up and learning. Eric Goldman's Technology & Marketing Law Blog is a great, public source covering cases on ToS and other issues, for example.
The Bar monopolizes representation within legal institutions. Don't cede the law itself to lawyers.
The dumbest person can be right, but as a lawyer, your guess is much better.
I don't cede the law. It's just that if I find this unclear, then J Random Hn commenter's opinion wouldn't reduce my risk.
I won't be acting based on your opinion either, of course, but the quality of your reply is clearly in a different class from the other two.
Good. Don't. Because it is exceedingly plain, if concise, English.
I don't think it says that at all. Because "accepting" is the right word here, as you point out. "Approval" is a different thing altogether. You can accept something without approving of it -- that's the main message in the Serenity Prayer and hundreds of self-help books that try to reframe that message, maybe to help it sink it, maybe just to grift a little.
If it was literally spelled out as "Your access is not conditioned on your approval" that could almost be taken as a threat -- you will access this whether you want to or not.
> For instance, your access of the website is not contingent on the website operator approving said access.
To me, this is clearly what it says. "(Your) access is not conditioned on (our) approval."
But, of course, since you read it differently, I have to agree that perhaps it's not as clear as I thought.
Did you see the actual lawyer saying they don't know what it means?
In any case, (a) it's not a request, and (b) if you truly want to control the narrative, then perhaps you should just do that from your own blog.
Of course even better is to simply have no explicit license, especially for something like code. Normal people can assume they can do whatever they'd like (basically, public domain). Lawyers will assume they cannot. The only thing stopping someone is their own belief in their self restrictions. i.e. you can use the thing if and only if you don't believe in my authority on the matter.
This is a terrible take. All it takes is a litigious jerk, and you could get bankrupt. And that jerk will be legally in the right.
Consider the war on drugs. Recreational marijuana is still highly illegal everywhere in the US, but there's businesses selling it that operate in plain view. How did we get there? Because people continued to point out how the law delegitimized itself until enforcement has started to become impossible.
This is a terrible take. All it takes is an angry mugger, and you could get killed.
That's why your analogy doesn't work.