IANAL, but typically contracts do not preempt criminal charges. You can’t just have someone sign a contract, and have it insulate you from criminal suits. Civil suits are a different thing, but I’m reasonably sure this’d fall under whatever cyber crimes statute the US has. In addition, I think the way those cyber crime suits work is they are bought by the state, and the state hasn’t agreed to the license anyway. At most, I see it being argued for a bit in court if charges are brought. Honestly, he deserves whatever is coming to him, NPM is a fucking mess, but this guys a right twat to have abused his position of trust like this. At the very least it’ll hopefully encourage JS developers to be a little more careful about dependencies, although it can be hard, since in JS development dependencies rapidly become horrendously nested, cause even now the standard library is quite lacking.