Comment by makeitdouble
5 days ago
Laws can definitively be retroactive or affect existing contracts. Imagine a world where governments have no power to stop anti-social behavior if it was ever baked into private contracts ?
Also the DMA didn't fall from the sky one day and enforced the next. Every business impacted had years to do something about it, and they preferred to play chicken race instead.
> Imagine a world where governments have no power to stop anti-social behavior
They DO have the power to STOP it, they just cannot punish past behaviour which was legal at the time! At least in USA, this is directly in the constitution:
Article 1 § 9 prohibits Congress from passing any laws which apply ex post facto.
Article 1 § 10 prohibits the states from passing any laws which apply ex post facto.
SCOTUS also clarified this in Beazell v. Ohio:
"It is settled, by decisions of this Court so well known that their citation may be dispensed with, that any statute which punishes as a crime an act previously committed, which was innocent when done, which makes more burdensome the punishment for a crime, after its commission, or which deprives one charged with crime of any defense available according to law at the time when the act was committed, is prohibited as ex post facto."
Now, I know that this is EU and not USA, but my argument is that EU is the ones being unreasonable here. It is illogical to make something illegal and then punish those who had done it before it was made so.