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Comment by worble | Hacker News Reader

>but there should be a VERY CLEAR definition of what counts as "reasonable playable state".

There's a weird idea online that laws are super specific and technical and that if you don't nail things down exactly people can side-step and go "wahaha I didn't break any rules!" when that's simply not the case.

Laws are more general and very much about the spirit of actions, and then the specificities get proven in court down the line. Those cases then get referenced in further court actions and end up informing the law overall, without having to have hyper specific wording for all edge-cases enshrined forever. This also provides fluidity for a changing and evolving legal and social system as a judge can take the specifics of that case into account. Every games definition of playable is going to be different, you can't codify something like that.

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Europe is a civil law system, which places much higher prominence on proper codification of law than the common law systems common in the Anglosphere, which is generally closer to the procedure you're talking about.

Yes, this is correct. But an ECI just requires that something happen from the Commission. In fact, revisions are basically expected if the Commission decides legislation is the path forward as past successful ECIs have demonstrated.

If you look at EU laws you'll still find plenty of examples of primary legislation setting out general, high-level concepts, which are then given more specificity in delegated regulations, regulatory guidance or court decisions.

It may not be a total coincidence that the common law based UK and US became so much more dominant in commerce. Obviously their imperial holdings had a lot to do with other factors too, like the UK's early lead in the industrial revolution, and the US's massive natural resources, but it's hard to ignore the advantage of a more nimble, flexible, yet predictable legal system for commerce in a time of rapidly changing technology.

UK is one the poorer countries in Western Europe and it has oil.

Sorry if it wasn't obvious, I was talking about the historical UK that owned and operated the British Empire up until the world wars and then almost seamlessly ceded the mantle to the US.

I bet you also are unable to learn any lessons from the ancient Roman empire since Rome is now just some touristy city with a lot of litter, or something?

The US produces around 13% of the world's oil today (and also produced most of the oil and gas for a period when it was new), around the same as Saudi Arabia, and has constantly benefitted from its natural resources (not just oil-- even going back to trees and iron ore)

But none of those things are in any way central to my point-- the advantage of being in a common law country when you run a business in a complex evolving commercial industry, so you can both depend on reliable consistent law, but also expect it to naturally and flexibly extend itself to new situations faster and more consistently with older expectations than a political legislature possibly can.

Well, Continental law was strongly inspired by Roman law and Roman law was prefered by Europea law experts when England was an Island kingdom while Roman Empire was ... An Empire. I don't think you are an expert in law systems comparision and your statements seems to be very broad and unsourced. (random economical number isn't a source)

Some companies like BASF struggle in the American law environment in a combination of jury responsibility (very old concept!), high penalties and jury don't have any clue about science.

I've never heard any such complaint about the European law systems.

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