Comment by halestock
19 hours ago
A lot of engineer types forget that the law is not code, and reductionist arguments almost never actually work in practice because it's a human interpreting the law.
19 hours ago
A lot of engineer types forget that the law is not code, and reductionist arguments almost never actually work in practice because it's a human interpreting the law.
For one example of this, around 10 years ago there was a company called Aereo that tried to act as a "cloud television provider". The idea was that they had thousands of tiny antennas hooked up to servers in a warehouse, and they would lease an antenna to each subscriber. This gave an experience similar to cable TV but without Aereo having to pay broadcasters cable transmission fees. The major broadcasters sued Aereo and ended up getting it shut down for exactly the reason you mention. Despite Aereo technically being a TV antenna leasing service, it functionally acted like a cable TV service so they were violating copyright by not paying transmission fees.
They were accused of "public performance" which doesn't make sense to the spirit of the law to begin with. Avoiding technicality via technicality is fine. They should have been allowed to run their thousands of independent servers.
The reason cable companies have to pay these fees in the first place is a narrow and somewhat pedantic argument that is entirely based on connecting multiple households to the same antenna. Which Aereo doesn't do, no trickery involved.
If there had been a style of "cable" company that used one wire and antenna per house from the start, they could have avoided these fees too. They only didn't exist because cables and antennas are expensive.
Any single person could have legally set up their own server and antenna. But Aereo building these en masse makes them a cable company instead of an antenna-building company because... vibes, basically.
The best evidence that this was a failure of justice is that they pivoted to "okay, we're cable, we'll pay the fees for a mandatory license" and got rejected for not being a cable company.
This sort of legal workaround can work (see Uber) though.
Uber avoided medallions.
I guess that proves law is not code!
It depends on how much money you have to grease the wheels.
> A lot of engineer types forget that the law is not code, and reductionist arguments almost never actually work in practice because it's a human interpreting the law.
It's worse than that: a lot of engineer types reason about almost everything as if it were code. It's a manifestation of Engineer's disease.
I now see engineers treating people like AI agents. It can always get worse...
It reminds me of tax law in many countries. You can follow the letter of the law, but if the vibes are off, you can still be found to be in breach of a vague catch-all provision (e.g. economic substance doctorine in the US, GAAR in Canada/UK, Part IVA in Australia, etc).
UK has systematic tax avoidance IIRC i.e. keep starting and closing businesses to save tax is frowned upon. Australia can treat your capital gains as income if your gains quack like trades. (Maybe now less important since the recent CGT changes).
To misquote Bismarck, only fools, drunks, and Americans actually believe the rule of law is real.
There is a strong bias by the courts to interpret the law in such a way that it makes sense, and achieves the goals the legislature had when enacting it.
Just read this point in a case revolving around the Oxford comma, stated in simple enough legalese I could understand:
“laws must be construed liberally in order to accomplish their remedial purpose" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Serial_comma#Maine_labor_dispu...
Maybe this is because of the TV dramas where a genius lawyer saves their client through an obscure technicality. It looks exactly like hacking a system using a 0-day exploit.
It's not that there's a human interpreting the law. It's that there is a politically motivated human interpreting the law, or in other words, you are sol if the state wants to get you. The engineer's arguments aren't reductionist, they are idealistic.
Does anyone think law is computer code? I mean any courtroom drama (even if far fetched) shows it is not.