Editor's note: Russ McGuire is the online director of Business Reform Magazine. Each issue of Business Reform features practical advice on operating successfully in business while glorifying God.
When it comes to new technology, sinners rule. Between sex and gambling, the earliest users and easily the first profitable users of many new technologies have been pornographers and casinos. If your company is developing a new technology, targeting these industries may provide the early revenues and ongoing profits that can provide the cash flow critical to the survival and success of any entrepreneurial venture. Of course, it is easier to take this stained money than it is to refuse it. If you want to block immoral businesses from using your technology, you need to take specific steps to achieve that blocking.
Toll free numbers, 900 numbers, telephone debit cards, pay per view, personal computers, computer bulletin board systems, online services, web e-commerce, video conferencing... the list is almost endless. Virtually every new information technology development has had its first commercial success at the hands of the sex and gambling industries. In large part, this is due to the anonymity and privacy afforded by many of these technologies. Using these technologies, an individual can indulge in their sinful habits from the privacy of their own home or hotel room. These industries are also deceivingly information intensive.
Bottom line, using these technologies creates tremendous new revenue opportunities for pornographers and casinos, all with very healthy margins, and often well beyond the reach of any law enforcement or regulatory agencies since the laws and regulations for these new technologies will always take years to develop.
You would likely be surprised by the names of some of the technology companies whose futures have been secured by successfully selling into this lucrative market. These deals typically don't show up in press releases and aren't trumpeted on the corporate web site. But the reality is that a relatively small number of such customers can quickly recoup development investment as well as provide tangible feedback from "real world" use that is invaluable to technology entreprenuers.
For a moral technologist, this creates a real quandry. The revenue opportunity represented by such a target market is certainly attractive, but if you're like me, serving and supporting these sinful businesses and therefore encouraging thousands or millions of people to sin is abhorrent. For many of us, even at the risk of ruining our companies, we will do everything we can to keep our technologies from being used by these sin industries.
Unfortunately, stopping a particular type of customer from using your product is much harder than it would seem. Without forethought, planning, and careful execution, you likely won't succeed in blocking your undesired customers. When planning release of your technology to market, you must consider both the legal and technical steps required to block use of your technology for immoral purposes. For some types of products, this will be easier than for others.
From a legal perspective, your greatest opportunity to define allowed uses of your technology will either be in a software license or in a service agreement. If your product requires either your software or an ongoing service to be operable, then you likely have a legal leg on which to stand. As your legal counselors assist you in writing your software license and/or service agreement, make sure they understand your desires and include the appropriate safeguards in the agreements.
For starters, you must retain your ability to cancel the license or service agreement at your discretion without any burden to prove specific conditions and without having to carefully define those conditions - placing either of these requirements upon you will create opportunities for the businesses you intend to block to claim that they should not be blocked. This is a battle that you either cannot win, or may die trying.
You must also limit your financial obligations related to terminating the license or service agreement. It is reasonable for the cancelled customer to expect and to rapidly receive back their payments since they can no longer use your technology. In fact, if you are like me, you will have no desire to hold onto their money. However, you will want to make sure that your financial obligations are limited to the amount that they have paid you. If you leave the door open for them to make financial claims against you because they claim that you are liable for losses in their business due to their need to change from your technology to a competitor's, you could quickly find yourself in a legal battle that can bankrupt your company.
Unfortunately, if your technology product is purely hardware and doesn't rely on any of your software or any of your services, then you may find it difficult to block specific uses, either legally or technically. Please note that these requirements will also keep you from using standard open source licenses, such as the GNU Public License (GPL) since these licenses are specifically intended to allow ANY use of the technology by ANYONE for ANY purpose.
But even if you can craft the right legal language to forbid use by pornographers and/or casinos, obviously that doesn't mean that they'll stop using it. Without the appropriate technical safeguards, you likely will never know that your technology is benefitting these sin industries. In the worst case, these sinners will pirate your technology and you won't see a cent while they are profiting handsomely from it. In the best case, your revenues may rapidly rise, but you'll have no visibility into who is using it and for what purposes.
The amount of monitoring and visibility that you need will require careful balancing between your desires and the respectful level of privacy required by your customers who are appropriately using your technology for legal and moral purposes.
Again, what is possible and appropriate will depend on the nature of your product. Since many of the technologies that will be most attractive to pornographers and online casinos are related to the Internet, you may consider some of these tactics:
- Require product registration over the Internet before the product will work.
- Have the software check the status of the license/service agreement each time it is run or periodically to ensure that the customer's ability to use the product hasn't been rescinded.
- If your product is involved in the operation of a web site, have the software notify you of each web site for which the product is being used. You can then monitor for appropriate use of your technology.
Taking such steps will likely give you the technology "hooks" you need to ensure that your product is being used appropriately, that it hasn't been pirated, and to shut down its use when necessary. However, you must also make sure that you don't overstep your bounds and frustrate or offend your real target users. Specifically:
- Do not use your technology to collect any information about individuals and their use of the internet without their explicit permission to do so.
- If your technology is "client" technology that is used by individual consumers, for example, a web browser to browse many types of web content, moral, amoral, and immoral, you really cannot concern yourself with how individual consumers are using your product. The focus of this article is on immoral, profit-focused use of technology by sin businesses.
- If your technology can be used both "online" and "offline", accommodate the times when the user may be legitimately using the technology offline, for example, while travelling on an airplane. You might allow a small number of offline product uses between online times that the agreement status is checked. If this number is exceeded, politely inform the user that they must revalidate their software license/service contract online before continuing to use the software.
If you think this sounds like a huge burden that is fraught with risk, you're right. But for many of us, it is a burden worth bearing!
As the first Psalm begins: "Blessed is the man that walketh not in the counsel of the ungodly, nor standeth in the way of sinners, nor sitteth in the seat of the scornful. But his delight is in the law of the Lord; and in his law doth he meditate day and night. And he shall be like a tree planted by the rivers of water, that bringeth forth his fruit in his season; his leaf also shall not wither; and whatsoever he doeth shall prosper."
So go - exclude your technology from the way of sin businesses - and prosper!
Russ McGuire is Online Director for Business Reform. Prior to joining Business
Reform, Mr. McGuire spent over twenty years in technology industries, performing various roles from writing mission critical software for the nuclear power and defense industries to developing core business strategies in the telecom industry. Mr. McGuire is currently focused on helping businesspeople apply God's eternal truths to their real-world business challenges through Business Reform's online services. He can be reached at [email protected].