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0 pointspresscast7y ago0 comments

>What is 'meant' is irrelevant. Important is the letter of the law.

Hold on, that's not true.

The intent of law matters and is codified in various ways, including stating the intent of the law directly in its text. This in turn informs judges (including appellate judges!) of how to evaluate a specific case. In jurisprudential systems, this in turn becomes case-law which further cements the intent of the law as a binding legal construct.

I agree the letter of the law is more strongly binding, but to dismiss intent as irrelevant suggests you don't understand the difference between law and computer code.

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6 comments · 2 top-level

Nasrudith7y ago· 4 in thread

Or they are exceedingly cynical about the arbiters and paranoid about abuses - not a bad tradition when defending rights.

Intents may be pretenses which are cheap and mean nothing. The USSR was "for the people" and killed record ammounts of them. Even if ungrounded in displayed maliciousness a "how will this be abused" mindset is its own tradition and I argue a good thing when considering and writing laws.

Since writing a law meant to allow self defense that has text which allows shooting jaywalkers from your backyard is a bad law "to stop offenses in progress" is a bad law. Even if "reasonableness" is applied that leads to more judiciary work, uncertainty and the possibility of injust absurdities holding. Like bashing the head man who is stabbing you right now into the tile wasn't self defense because wood could have stopped him with less force. Explicit text definitions could have stopped the absurdity with say "threat of lethal force by an invading interloper may be met with lethal force" or "proportionate force" even.

I recognize EU law holds different principles but it isn't treating law as computer code. The opposite in my opinion - you are clinically paranoid if you think your compiler will try to twist your code in its favor. You are accurate when describing people and the law.

nokcha7y ago

>you are clinically paranoid if you think your compiler will try to twist your code in its favor

C compilers have been known to "optimize" code with undefined behavior in such a way as to introduce a security vulnerability that would not exist in the most direct translation of the C code to machine code.

Nasrudith7y ago

Yeah it is incompetence not malice. Although it probably feels malicious to anybody working with it.

candiodari7y ago

There's very good reason for that : this law is yet another example of the EU's new favorite tactic: laws without the justice system.

The ONLY person that can use this law is the EU executive (commission). They get to sue, essentially any site they want on the internet. You, EU citizen or not, do not get to sue anyone else, no matter how much copyright infringement, how much damage. You can politely ask the (no doubt up to 10 person) EU agency that the commission puts in charge of this law, but that's it.

The EU commission is not just the only party that can use the law, they are also arbiter of this law. They never have to build a case before court, and of course in practice this means you're declared guilty and punished before your first chance to see a court.

In other words: they can prevent any site they like from getting sued at all and they can sue any site and convict. Then you can fight that decision in court (after, of course, penalties are extracted). In court, you start from an extremely disadvantaged position: you have been tried and found guilty. Effectively, in court you only get an appeal option.

I mean I know the EU is a dictatorship (because the both the positive and negative legislative power is in exclusive hands of the executive alone, the EU commission and council: they can enact any law they like with or without parliament approval and they can prevent any law from becoming law, no matter how much parliament wants it. Or they can change it at will, or ...

But this is even worse than that. This law does not just give them dictatorial power, but essentially makes them an international public prosecutor for internet sites, who does NOT report to any elected government (only reports to the commission which is not elected).

presscastOP7y ago

>Or they are exceedingly cynical about the arbiters and paranoid about abuses - not a bad tradition when defending rights.

I agree, but that's a matter of opinion. What's factual is that the parent post builds an argument on a false premise.

pathseeker7y ago

If you have to reference the intent for every trivial case like HN, the letter of the law is worthless.

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