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Comment by kevsamuel | Hacker News Reader

Legality is not science, most of the time, the definition of what's wrong is blurry and humans have to debate about it.

Laws shouldn't be written without clear lines - how can a person who wants to avoid breaking the law do that if we have an ever growing list of laws full of gray area and blurry lines?

does this concern your everyday life?

Blurry lines and gray areas in law? Absolutely, I'd rather not accidentally break a law that is only defined after the fact in court.

No do you have real problems with blurry laws in your country? (If so is this country in the EU?)

This is a really strange way to attempt to silence my opinion.

Yes I do have issues with blurry laws. My current country is not in the EU, though until recently I was a resident of an EU country also with blurry laws. Am I allowed to have an opinion now?

For me it's sounds like a made up problem.

Again, most laws are blurry in a mathematical sense. This is the case since laws existed. And so and to a surprise for some HN people, we usually don't break them all day.

DMA is actually precise and rooted in competitions challenges all known. (E.g. the slack case was discussed very often) Complaining about the DMA is very strange. Also DMA targets big corpos, so needing a lawyer to understand all implications is again a none - issue.

> This is a really strange way to attempt to silence my opinion.

It's that your replies in this thread show a complete lack of understanding and a refusal to take in multiple people patiently explaining to you.

Apart from your bizarre posture that calling out your low quality posting constitutes "silencing" you.

The GP comment I was referring to asked where I live with no other context. The implication there is that my having an opinion, or at least sharing it, is somehow gated by whether I'm currently living in the EU.

We may have different interpretations of the law, or different opinions on what we think the laws should be, but that doesn't mean I am bizarrely posturing with no understanding of the law.

In corporate antitrust law, specifically. Nobody is going to jail over this. They might just have to change the sales terms. Is this so terrible?

That just depends on how you look at it and what your opinion is with regards to what the role of governments should be.

I'd argue that its terrible from the angle of government overreach, this still seems well within the realm of a free market problem.

I'd also argue its terrible that corporate law is almost entirely boiled down to fines with no person really having to live with the consequences of their actions. That effectively makes it an accounting game, you're totally fine breaking the law as long as (a) its just a corporate expense and (b) you believe that you'll make more money breaking the law than you will lose in court.

You’re going to be very unhappy when you learn what common law is. The law that decides a case is written after the fact. (Yes, retroactively!)

You're not supposed to. The state is always supposed to have a treasure trove of possible crimes they can smack you with.

If you're a big company and the penalty is only a fine... there is not much need to be absolutely sure you don't break the law. It is just another risk, like the risk of a data center catching on fire, that is to be managed, not avoided at all costs. Law for you and me means someone might go to jail and that's worth avoiding all costs, but for a company it just means spending more money or receiving less.

Cases are also more unique. People get murdered "routinely" so everyone has figured out the clear lines. Antitrust doesn't happen as often and each case is unique.

Are you hoping for a world where corporations can find loopholes and it's impossible to punish them for exploiting the loopholes because we can only execute the law strictly like a computer program? Even ethereum smart contracts can be overturned - it happened once.

No I'd actually rather see the opposite. If we really think its imperative that the government defines corporate laws then I'd want to see companies and those making decisions held legally liable.

Corporate law as it stands today is more of a game of accounting, trying to figure out what laws you break and how you make more profit from it then you may lose in court. Is it really so important that our governments define these laws only to chase companies for legal cases that either amount to nothing or a fraction of the profits gained? Would we be better off either not having the laws at all, or by enforcing those laws with criminal penalty to those people shown to have knowingly made decisions to break the law?

> Would we be better off either not having the laws at all, or by enforcing those laws with criminal penalty to those people shown to have knowingly made decisions to break the law?

Yes to this part though. We shouldn't be writing laws enforcible in perpetuity when we can't even define what the law covers. How are citizens meant to stay on the right side of the law when the laws are purposely gray get still punishable after clarifying the details later?

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