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Someone please, try to construct an argument in favor of this. There's usually a counter-argument however weak. How can citizens obey laws they have no way of

Someone please, try to construct an argument in favor of this. There's usually a counter-argument however weak. How can citizens obey laws they have no way of reading? (Come to think of it, at no point has anyone explained all the laws to me, either. Are we all supposed to peruse law books in our spare time to make sure we're not breaking the law?)

sedeki 10y ago
It is called the social contract, and you are bound by it whether you like it or not.
steauengeglase 10y ago
Snarky me says to create better Kafka-esque experiences. Pragmatic me says legislators were more than happy to essentially rubber-stamp, "We'll defer to a higher power because this stuff is super complicated and really esoteric stuff" and the higher power said it wanted a paycheck.
jaredklewis 10y ago
As others have pointed out in this thread, the laws in question are not the kind that apply to you, they apply to construction companies and such. Those companies are expected to pay access fees for the law. The debate was whether to provide public access to these laws. As for the rest of the laws, at least in the US, following common sense will keep you out of trouble most of the time. Judges by and large do not decide cases by mechanically interpreting laws, but rather by choosing which laws make most sense to apply in the given context. It is even sometimes possible to outright break laws, as in famous cases like State v Shack.
dragonwriter 10y ago
> Someone please, try to construct an argument in favor of this. The ABA is lobbying to for the government to mandate at least public read access to what are now, private, for-pay standards incorporated into laws and regulations. The argument for this is you shouldn't have to pay to read the law (there is certainly an argument [which I agree with] -- as in the source article -- that this isn't enough access, and that ideally we should have more. But that's an argument that the ABA position doesn't go far enough to correct the problem in the status quo, rather than an argument that it is in the wrong direction.) > How can citizens obey laws they have no way of reading? That's exactly the problem that the ABA proposal addresses -- in the status quo, there are rules you have no way of reading. With the ABA proposal, that would no longer be the case.
bluGill 10y ago
The counter argument is this: It takes a lot of time to figure out what the code should be. Is a 1cm by 1cm board strong enough to hold up a building, what about a 60cm by 60 cm board? Obviously the first is not, while the second is way overkill and a waste of money (I haven't done any calculations on this so I might be wrong!). Someone needs to figure out the properties of building materials and the right margin of safety. That is generally engineers who want to eat so we have to pay them. Thus it costs a lot of money to write a good code. If you can copy their work for free nobody will do that work - you need to eat so you won't have time after your day job to check and recheck everything even if you wanted to. The problem is this: in a free copy world once someone pays for this work everyone else is free to copy it. So if Chicago pays for it, New York City is free to just copy Chicago's law and save all the money of paying someone to do this themselves. This is obviously unfair to Chicago who put a lot of money into it. (Chicago and New York might agree to share the costs, but there are a lot of small towns that will not) What code publishers want to do is privately put the money in to write a good code, get the cities to make it law, and then charge for copies. This business model works, and is fair: you buy the code if you want it (and $75 for the book it isn't that unreasonable a price to pay either if you need it). The city gets a copy in their library so if you don't want your own copy just read when city offices are open. It isn't a bad deal. (do not read the above as my approval of it, I'm just stating the argument)

sedeki 10y ago

It is called the social contract, and you are bound by it whether you like it or not.

steauengeglase 10y ago

Snarky me says to create better Kafka-esque experiences. Pragmatic me says legislators were more than happy to essentially rubber-stamp, "We'll defer to a higher power because this stuff is super complicated and really esoteric stuff" and the higher power said it wanted a paycheck.

jaredklewis 10y ago

As others have pointed out in this thread, the laws in question are not the kind that apply to you, they apply to construction companies and such. Those companies are expected to pay access fees for the law. The debate was whether to provide public access to these laws. As for the rest of the laws, at least in the US, following common sense will keep you out of trouble most of the time. Judges by and large do not decide cases by mechanically interpreting laws, but rather by choosing which laws make most sense to apply in the given context. It is even sometimes possible to outright break laws, as in famous cases like State v Shack.

dragonwriter 10y ago

> Someone please, try to construct an argument in favor of this. The ABA is lobbying to for the government to mandate at least public read access to what are now, private, for-pay standards incorporated into laws and regulations. The argument for this is you shouldn't have to pay to read the law (there is certainly an argument [which I agree with] -- as in the source article -- that this isn't enough access, and that ideally we should have more. But that's an argument that the ABA position doesn't go far enough to correct the problem in the status quo, rather than an argument that it is in the wrong direction.) > How can citizens obey laws they have no way of reading? That's exactly the problem that the ABA proposal addresses -- in the status quo, there are rules you have no way of reading. With the ABA proposal, that would no longer be the case.

bluGill 10y ago

The counter argument is this: It takes a lot of time to figure out what the code should be. Is a 1cm by 1cm board strong enough to hold up a building, what about a 60cm by 60 cm board? Obviously the first is not, while the second is way overkill and a waste of money (I haven't done any calculations on this so I might be wrong!). Someone needs to figure out the properties of building materials and the right margin of safety. That is generally engineers who want to eat so we have to pay them. Thus it costs a lot of money to write a good code. If you can copy their work for free nobody will do that work - you need to eat so you won't have time after your day job to check and recheck everything even if you wanted to. The problem is this: in a free copy world once someone pays for this work everyone else is free to copy it. So if Chicago pays for it, New York City is free to just copy Chicago's law and save all the money of paying someone to do this themselves. This is obviously unfair to Chicago who put a lot of money into it. (Chicago and New York might agree to share the costs, but there are a lot of small towns that will not) What code publishers want to do is privately put the money in to write a good code, get the cities to make it law, and then charge for copies. This business model works, and is fair: you buy the code if you want it (and $75 for the book it isn't that unreasonable a price to pay either if you need it). The city gets a copy in their library so if you don't want your own copy just read when city offices are open. It isn't a bad deal. (do not read the above as my approval of it, I'm just stating the argument)