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As someone who has spent 25+ years working with legislation and legislators in the US, to me the point is not whether the comma is the problem (to Apple) but ra

As someone who has spent 25+ years working with legislation and legislators in the US, to me the point is not whether the comma is the problem (to Apple) but rather that the law is the law. If the legislators wanted to do something other than what they did, they should have been more clear. If there was a mistake in the drafting, legislators can now fix it. But any fix will not be retroactive. And in my experience, very few legislators would be able to tell you what they thought they were doing when that provision was drafted. As to it being farcical, I wonder if this behavior of parsing grammar and punctuation is getting more common.

eviks 1y ago
> If the legislators wanted to do something other than what they did, they should have been more clear Except for the fact that this mythical clarity simply doesn't exist, so no amount of want can create it. And to add more to the farce: the criteria the courts use aren't clear either
saurik 1y ago
> As someone who has spent 25+ years working with legislation and legislators in the US, to me the point is not whether the comma is the problem (to Apple) but rather that the law is the law. It is my understanding that this is a big difference between the US and the EU: the US leans heavily into textualism / literal interpretation, while the EU leans much more into purposivism / teleological interpretation.
- Doxin 1y ago
  While the purposivism approach has its own problems, it does seem to avoid a lot of shenanigans of the form "Well you didn't say we couldn't sell ground up orphans as soup." There should be space for companies and people to make honest mistakes or misunderstandings and not get punished too harshly for it, but when a company like apple has their lawyers go over legal texts with a fine tooth comb to look for a single sentence that could be possibly interpreted in their advantage, knowing full well they are circumventing the intent of the law by doing so, I don't see an issue with telling them in no uncertain terms to knock it off.

eviks 1y ago

> If the legislators wanted to do something other than what they did, they should have been more clear Except for the fact that this mythical clarity simply doesn't exist, so no amount of want can create it. And to add more to the farce: the criteria the courts use aren't clear either

saurik 1y ago

> As someone who has spent 25+ years working with legislation and legislators in the US, to me the point is not whether the comma is the problem (to Apple) but rather that the law is the law. It is my understanding that this is a big difference between the US and the EU: the US leans heavily into textualism / literal interpretation, while the EU leans much more into purposivism / teleological interpretation.

Doxin 1y ago
While the purposivism approach has its own problems, it does seem to avoid a lot of shenanigans of the form "Well you didn't say we couldn't sell ground up orphans as soup." There should be space for companies and people to make honest mistakes or misunderstandings and not get punished too harshly for it, but when a company like apple has their lawyers go over legal texts with a fine tooth comb to look for a single sentence that could be possibly interpreted in their advantage, knowing full well they are circumventing the intent of the law by doing so, I don't see an issue with telling them in no uncertain terms to knock it off.