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An interesting aspect of this, especially their blog post (https://malus.sh/blog.html https://malus.sh/blog.html ), is that it acknowledges a strain in our lega

by jerf 7mo ago

An interesting aspect of this, especially their blog post (https://malus.sh/blog.html https://malus.sh/blog.html ), is that it acknowledges a strain in our legal system I've been observing for decades, but don't think the legal system or people in general have dealt with, which is that generally costs matter. A favorite example of mine is speed limits. There is a difference between "putting up a sign that says 55 mph and walking away", "putting up a sign that says 55 mph and occasionally enforcing it with expensive humans when they get around to it", and "putting up a sign that says 55 mph and rigidly enforcing it to the exact mph through a robot". Nominally, the law is "don't go faster than 55 mph". Realistically, those are three completely different policies in every way that matters. We are all making a continual and ongoing grave error thinking that taking what were previously de jure policies that were de facto quite different in the real world, and thoughtlessly "upgrading" the de jure policies directly into de facto policies without realizing that that is in fact a huge change in policy. One that nobody voted for, one that no regulator even really thought about, one that we are just thoughtlessly putting into place because "well, the law is, 55 mph" without realizing that, no, in fact that never was the law before. That's what the law said, not what it was. In the past those could never really be the same thing. Now, more and more, they can. This is a big change! Cost of enforcement matters. The exact same nominal law that is very costly to enforce has completely different costs and benefits then that same law becoming all but free to rigidly enforce. And without very many people consciously realizing it, we have centuries of laws that were written with the subconscious realization that enforcement is difficult and expensive, and that the discretion of that enforcement is part of the power of the government. Blindly translating those centuries of laws into rigid, free enforcement is a terrible idea for everyone. Yet we still have almost no recognition that that is an issue. This could, perhaps surprisingly, be one of the first places we directly grapple with this in a legal case someday soon, that the legality of something may be at least partially influenced by the expense of the operation.

JackYoustra 7mo ago
The answer to this is just changing the law as enforcement becomes different, instead of leaning on the rule of a few people to determine what the appropriate level of enforcement is. To do this, though, you're going to have to get rid of veto points! A bit hard in our disastrously constitutional system.
igor47 7mo ago
Dean Ball made this exact point on the Ezra Klein show a few days ago. I always thought laws would get more just with perfect enforcement -- the people passing mandatory sentencing laws for minor drug offenses would think twice if their own children, and not just minorities and unfavourable groups, were subject to the same consequences (instead of rehab or community service). But if I've learned anything in 20 years of software eng, it's that migration plans matter. The perfect system is irrelevant if you can't figure out how to transition to it. AI is dangling a beautiful future in front of us, but the transition looks... Very challenging
- eru 7mo ago
  Hmm, the problem is that judges and even police officers are generally saner than voters. Giving the former discretion was a way to sneakily contain the worst excesses of the latter. Alas, self-interest isn't really something voters seem to really take into account.
  - lupire 7mo ago
    Judges and police officers have their own massive "worst excesses".
    - vkou 7mo ago
      They do, but letting mob rule decide criminal sanction is beyond fucked. See: Any discussion thread of literally any criminal being sentenced, receiving parole, or better yet, committing any crime after being released for serving a different one.
      - worthless-trash 7mo ago
        Its almost like they are sick of people commiting crimes.
- wat10000 7mo ago
  How many times have we seen politicians advocate for laws against something, then do a 180 when one of their kids does it? Even if you had that system, I don't think it would work the way you say. People are dumb and politicians are no exception.
parpfish 7mo ago
I think this distinction also gets at some issue with things like privacy and facial recognition. There’s the old approach of hanging a wanted poster and asking people to “call us if you see this guy”. Then there’s the new approach matching faces in a comprehensive database and camera networks. The later is just the perfect, efficient implementation of the former. But it’s… different somehow.
modeless 7mo ago
We should welcome more precise law enforcement. Imperfect enforcement is too easy for law enforcement officers to turn into selective enforcement. By choosing who to go after, law enforcement gets the unearned power to change the law however they want, enforcing unwritten rules of their choosing. Having law enforcement make the laws is bad. The big caveat, though, is that when enforcement becomes more accurate, the rules and penalties need to change. As you point out, a rigidly enforced law is very different from one that is less rigorously enforced. You are right that there is very little recognition of this. The law is difficult to change by design, but it may soon have to change faster than it has in the past, and it's not clear how or if that can happen. Historically, it seems like the only way rapid governmental change happens is by violent revolution, and I would rather not live in a time of violent revolution...
- Twey 7mo ago
  The problem with precise law enforcement is that the legal system is incredibly complex. There's a tagline that ‘everybody's a criminal’; I don't know if that's necessarily true but I do definitely believe that a large number of ‘innocent’ people are criminals (by the letter of the law) without their knowledge. Because we usually only bother to prosecute crimes if some obvious harm has been done this doesn't cause a lot of damage in practice (though it can be abused), but if you start enforcing the letter of every law precisely it suddenly becomes the obligation of every citizen to know every law — in a de facto way, rather than just the de jure way we currently have as a consequence of ‘ignorance of the law is no excuse’. So an increase of precision in law enforcement must be preceded by a drastic simplification of the law itself — not a bad thing by any means, but also not an easy (or, perhaps, possible) task.
  - RobRivera 7mo ago
    Precise law enforcement would motivate political will to proactively law change to be more precise and appropriate, or tuned, to the public sentiment. Imprecise law enforcement enables political office holders to arbitrarily leverage the law to arrest people they label as a political enemy, e.g. Aaron Swartz. If everyone that ever shared publications outside the legal subscriber base was precisely arrested, charged, and punished, I dont think the punishment amd current legal terrain regarding the charges leveraged against him would have lasted. But this is a feature, not a bug.
Pannoniae 7mo ago
Yup :P As in their post: "The future of software is not open. It is not closed. It is liberated, freed from the constraints of licenses written for a world in which reproduction required effort, maintained by a generation of developers who believed that sharing code was its own reward and have been comprehensively proven right about the sharing and wrong about the reward." This applies to open-source but also very well to proprietary software too ;) Reversing your competitors' software has never been easier!
- degamad 7mo ago
  If they really believed that their process eliminated any licensing conditions, why would they limit themselves to open source projects? High quality decompilers have existed for a long time, and there's a lot more value in making a cleanroom implementation of Photoshop or Office than of Redis or Linux. Why go after such a small market? I suspect the answer us that they don't believe it's legal, they just think that they can get away with it because they're less likely to get sued. (I really suspect that they don't believe that at all, and it's all just a really good satire - after all, they blatantly called the company "EvilCorp" in Latin.)
  - Pannoniae 7mo ago
    >If they really believed that their process eliminated any licensing conditions, why would they limit themselves to open source projects? Because this is satire by FOSS people :)
clickety_clack 7mo ago
De jure, there is no difference between de facto and de jure. De facto there is.
cuu508 7mo ago
> We are all making a continual and ongoing grave error > Blindly translating those centuries of laws into rigid, free enforcement is a terrible idea for everyone. I understand your point that changing the enforcement changes how the law is "felt" even though on the paper the law has not changed. And I think it makes sense to review and potentially revise the laws when enforcement methods change. But in the specific case of the 55 mph limit, would the consequences really be grave and terrible if the enforcement was enforced by a robot, but the law remained the same?
- Ntrails 7mo ago
  Yeah, I'd have to go slower???? Anyway. I come from the UK where we've had camera based enforcement for aeons. This of course actually results in people speeding and braking down to the limit as they approach the camera (which is of course announced loudly by their sat nav). The driving quality is frankly worse because of this, not better, and it certainly doesn't reduce incidence of speeding. Of course the inevitable car tracker (or average speed cameras) resolve this pretty well.
- diacritical 7mo ago
  > would the consequences really be grave and terrible if the enforcement was enforced by a robot The potential consequences of mass surveillance come to mind.
  - cuu508 7mo ago
    OK, but that would be a consequence of the specific enforcement method, not a consequence the law becoming de facto stricter due to stricter enforcement.
- lupire 7mo ago
  For one thing, the speed limit is intentionally set 5-10mph too low, specifically to make it easier to prove guilt when someone breaks the "real" speed limit.
  - JoshTriplett 7mo ago
pfortuny 7mo ago
Not exactly the same but at least in Spain, the cost of constructing a new building subject to all the regulations makes them completely unafforfable for low salaries. (There are other problems, I know, but the regulations are crazy).
- cataphract 7mo ago
  What's been driving up the cost of construction (it's already up to 2000-2400 eur/m2 for a detached house in Portugal) has been mostly cost of materials and labour. People complain about the regulations, but they also complain about houses that are structurally unsound, unventilated, flammable, badly isolated acoustically and thermally and so on... I don't think going back is the way to go. It's true that sometimes licensing that too long, though.
  - pfortuny 7mo ago
    Yes, that is also true, of course. But then again, we have turned "security" into something absurd which only adds costs.
LeifCarrotson 7mo ago
Absolutely! We're not all making that error, I've been venting about it for years. "Costs matter" is one way to say it, probably a lot easier to digest and more popular than the "Quantity has a quality all it's own" quote I've been using, which is generally attributed to Stalin which is a little bit of a problem. But it's absolutely true! Flock ALPRs are equivalent to a police officer with binoculars and a post-it for a wanted vehicle's make, model, and license plate, except we can put hundreds of them on the major intersections throughout a city 24/7 for $20k instead of multiplying the police budget by 20x. A warrant to gather gigabytes of data from an ISP or email provider is equivalent to a literal wiretap and tape recorder on a suspect's phone line, except the former costs pennies to implement and the later requires a human to actually move wires and then listen for the duration. Speed cameras are another excellent example. Technology that changes the cost of enforcement changes the character of the law. I don't think that no one realizes this. I think many in office, many implementing the changes, and many supporting or voting for those groups are acutely aware and greedy for the increased authoritarian control but blind to the human rights harms they're causing.
seethishat 7mo ago
The issue with strictly enforcing the speed limit on roads is that sometimes, people must speed. They must break the law. Wife giving birth, rushing a wounded person to the ER, speeding to avoid a collision, etc. If we wanted to strictly enforce speed limits, we would put governors on engines. However, doing that would cause a lot of harm to normal people. That's why we don't do it. Stop and think about what it means to be human. We use judgement and decide when we must break the laws. And that is OK and indeed... expected.
- arcticfox 7mo ago
  The answer is not a governor but a speed camera, they have them all over in Brazil and they send you a ticket if you speed through them. Put an exception in the law for emergencies, provide an appeal process, and voila.
- ahtihn 7mo ago
  > sometimes, people must speed. They must break the law. Wife giving birth, rushing a wounded person to the ER, speeding to avoid a collision I would argue that only the last one is a valid reason because it's the only one where it's clear that not speeding leads to direct worse consequences. Speed limits don't exist just to annoy people. Speeding increases the risk of accident and especially the consequences of an accident. I don't trust people to drive well in a stressful situation, so why would it be a good idea to let them increase the risk by speeding. The worst part is that it's not even all that likely that the time saved by speeding ends up mattering.
  - tekne 7mo ago
    E(accident due to going faster) vs E(worse outcome due to waiting) Your argument only makes sense if the only possible bad thing is a car accident -- to make my point clearer, would you take a 1% chance of losing 100$ to avoid a 50% chance of losing 10$? Depends how much money you have, but it can be a perfectly rational decision.
  - tinier_subsets 7mo ago
    The “wife giving birth” exception for speeding is always so amusing to me. In the U.S., the average distance from a hospital is 10 miles (in a rural area). Assuming 55 mph speed limits, that means most people are 11 minutes from a hospital. Realistically, “speeding” in this scenario probably means something like 80 mph, so you cut your travel time to 7.5 minutes. In other words, you just significantly increased your chances of killing your about to be born kid, your wife, yourself, and innocent bystanders just to potentially arrive at a hospital 210 seconds sooner. Edit: the rushing someone to an ER scenario is possibly more ridiculous, since you can’t teleport yourself, and if the 3.5 minutes in the above scenario would make a difference, then driving someone to the ER is a significantly worse option than starting first aid while waiting for EMTs to arrive.
mlyle 7mo ago
> Cost of enforcement matters. The exact same nominal law that is very costly to enforce has completely different costs and benefits then that same law becoming all but free to rigidly enforce. Hey, I really like this framing. This is a topic that I've thought about from a different perspective. We have all kinds of 18th and 19th century legal precedents about search, subpoenas, plain sight, surveillance in public spaces, etc... that really took for granted that police effort was limited and that enforcement would be imperfect. But they break down when you read all the license plates, or you can subpoena anyone's email, or... whatever. Making the laws rigid and having perfect enforcement has a cost-- but just the baseline cost to privacy and the squashing of innocent transgression is a cost. (A counterpoint: a lot of selective law enforcement came down to whether you were unpopular or unprivileged in some way... cheaper and automated enforcement may take some of these effects away and make things more fair. Discretion in enforcement can lead to both more and less just outcomes).
- tekne 7mo ago
  I think the fundamental issue is that a form of equality where everyone gets what was previously the worst outcome is... probably worse.
  - pocksuppet 7mo ago
    Many times when politicians get to suffer the full effects of their laws, the laws quickly change for the better.
- miki123211 7mo ago
  This is my problem with Americans and their "but the constitution" arguments. The U.S. constitution has been written in an age before phones, automatic and semi-automatic rifles (at least in common use), nuclear weapons, high-bandwidth communications networks that operate at lightning speed, mass media, unbreakable encryption and CCTV cameras.
  - bombcar 7mo ago
    The problem is that "all sides" agree that if the constitution was written today, surprise, surprise, it'd totally agree with them; the gun control people are sure that the 2nd wouldn't cover military weapons, the gun lovers are sure that it would mandate tanks for everyone. But since having 300 million people have a detailed, nuanced discussion about anything is impossible, everyone works at the edges.
schoen 7mo ago
There was this scholarly article from Pamela Samuelson and Suzanne Scotchmer https://yalelawjournal.org/pdf/200_ay258cck.pdf https://yalelawjournal.org/pdf/200_ay258cck.pdf which, as I recall it, suggested that the copyright law effectively considered that it was good that there was a way around copyright (with reverse engineering and clean-room implementation), and also good that the way around copyright required some investment in its own right, rather than being free, easy, and automatic. I think Samuelson and Scotchmer thought that, as you say, costs matter, and that the legal system was recognizing this, but in a kind of indirect way, not overtly.
sweetjuly 7mo ago
This has also been a common theme in recent decades with respect to privacy. In the US, the police do not generally need a warrant to tail you as you go around town, but it is phenomenally expensive and difficult to do so. Cellphone location records, despite largely providing the same information, do require warrants because it provides extremely cheap, scalable tracking of anyone. In other words, we allow the government to acquire certain information through difficult means in hopes that it forces them to be very selective about how they use it. When the costs changed, what was allowed also had to change.
- unreal37 7mo ago
  I think of this in reverse. It's legal for the government to track mail - who sent a message, and who it's going to. They have access to the "outside of the envelope". But it's not legal for them to read the message inside. And this same principle allows them to build massive friend/connection networks of everyone electronically. The government knows every single person you've communicated with and how often you communicate with them. It was never designed for this originally.
kibwen 7mo ago
Seconded, thirded, fourthed. I spend a lot of time thinking about how laws, in practice, are not actually intended to be perfectly enforced, and not even in the usual selective-enforcement way, just in the pragmatic sense.
miki123211 7mo ago
And this goes both ways. Many governments around the world have entities to which you can write a letter, and those entities are frequently obligated to respond to that letter within a specific time frame. Those laws have been written with the understanding that most people don't know how to write letters, and those who do, will not write them unless absolutely necessary. This allows the regulators to be slow and operate by shuffling around inefficient paper forms, instead of keeping things in an efficient ticket tracking system. LLMs make it much, much easier to write letters, even if you don't speak the language and can only communicate at the level of a sixth-grader. Imagine what happens when the worst kind of "can I talk to your supervisor" Karen gets access to a sycophantic LLM, which tells her that she's "absolutely right, this is absolutely unacceptable behavior, I will help you write a letter to your regulator, who should help you out in this situation."
- cortesoft 7mo ago
  I have some lawyer friends, who work as internal council to companies, that are already experiencing this. People are cranking out legal requests and claims with LLMs and sending them to companies. Almost all of them are pretty much meaningless, and should be ignored. However, they legally can't just ignore them. They have to have someone review the claim, verify that it is bullshit, and then they can ignore it. That takes time, though. So people can generate and send millions of legal claim instantly, but the lawyers have to read them one by one. The asymmetry of effort is huge, and causes real issues.
  - tirant 7mo ago
    They just need to implement a better LLM that is able to deal with all that crap. At the end we will just have agents interacting with each other.
    - cortesoft 7mo ago
      The problem is the legal liability is also asymmetrical. If the person making the bogus legal claims with the LLM messes up, the claim will just be dismissed and it isn't a big deal for the person making the claim. If the reading LLM messes up and classifies a real claim with the bogus ones, the company could have a major problem.
popalchemist 7mo ago
If you had to put a name to this phenomenon, what would it be?
encom 7mo ago
>https://malus.sh/blog.html https://malus.sh/blog.html An interesting read, however I'd like to know how to stop websites from screwing around with my scrollbars. In this case it's hidden entirely. Why is this even a thing websites are allowed to do - to change and remove browser UI elements? It makes no sense even, because I have no idea where I am on the page, or how long it is, without scrolling to the bottom to check. God I miss 2005.
tmoravec 7mo ago
Privacy protection has the exact same issue. Wiretapping laws were created at the time there was literally a detective listening to a private phone conversation as it was happening. Now we record almost everything online, and processing it is trivial and essentially free. The safeguards are the same but the scale of privacy invasion is many orders of magnitude different.
pessimizer 7mo ago
> Realistically, those are three completely different policies in every way that matters. I think that the failure to distinguish them is due to a really childish outlook on law and government that is encouraged by people who are simple-minded (because it is easy and moralistic) and by people who are in control of law and government (because it extends their control to social enforcement.) I don't think any discussion about government, law, or democracy is worth anything without an analysis of government that actually looks at it - through seeing where decisions are made, how those decisions are disseminated, what obligations the people who receive those decisions have to follow them and what latitude they have to change them, and ultimately how they are carried out: the endpoint of government is the application of threats, physical restraint, pain, or death in order to prevent people from doing something they wish to do or force them to do something they do not wish to do, and the means to discover where those methods should be applied. The police officer, the federal agent, the private individual given indemnity from police officers and federal agencies under particular circumstances, the networked cameras pointed into the streets are government. Government has a physical, material existence, a reach. Democracy is simpler to explain under that premise. It's the degree to which the people that this system controls control the decisions that this system carries out. The degree to which the people who control the system are indemnified from its effects is the degree of authoritarianism. Rule by the ungoverned. It's also why the biggest sign of political childishness for me are these sort of simple ideas of "international law." International law is a bunch of understandings between nations that any one of them can back out of or simply ignore at any time for any reason, if they are willing to accept the calculated risk of consequences from the nations on the other side of the agreement. It's like national law in quality, but absolutely unlike it in quantity. Even Costa Rica has a far better chance of ignoring, without any long-term cost, the mighty US trying to enforce some treaty regulation than you as an individual have to ignore the police department. Laws were constructed under this reality. If we hypothetically programmed those laws into unstoppable Terminator-like robots and told them to enforce them without question it would just be a completely different circumstance. If those unstoppable robots had already existed with absolute enforcement, we would have constructed the laws with more precision and absolute limitations. We wouldn't have been able to avoid it, because after a law was set the consequences would have almost instantly become apparent. With no fuzziness, there's no selective enforcement, but also no discretion (what people call selective enforcement they agree with.) If enforcement has blanket access and reach, there's also no need to make an example or deter. Laws were explicitly formulated around these purposes, especially the penalties set. If every crime was caught current penalties would be draconian, because they implicitly assume that everyone who got caught doing one thing got away with three other things, and for each person who was caught doing a thing three others got away with doing that thing. It punishes for crimes undetected, and attempts to create fear in people still uncaught.
derefr 7mo ago
> There is a difference between "putting up a sign that says 55 mph and walking away", "putting up a sign that says 55 mph and occasionally enforcing it with expensive humans when they get around to it", and "putting up a sign that says 55 mph and rigidly enforcing it to the exact mph through a robot". Nominally, the law is "don't go faster than 55 mph". Realistically, those are three completely different policies in every way that matters. ...and there's also a large difference between any of those three shifts, and the secular shift (i.e. through no change in regulatory implementation whatsoever!) that occurs when the majority of traffic begins to consist of autonomous vehicles that completely ignore the de facto flow-of-traffic speeds, because they've been programmed to rigorously follow the all laws, including posted de jure speed limits (because the car companies want to CYA.) Which is to say: even if regulators do literally nothing, they might eventually have to change the letter of the law to better match the de facto spirit of the law, lest we are overcome by a world of robotic "work to rule" inefficiencies. --- Also, a complete tangent: there's also an even-bigger difference between any of those shifts, and the shift that occurs when traffic calming measures are imposed on the road (narrowing, adding medians, adding curves, etc.) Speed limits are an extremely weird category of regulation, as they try to "prompt" humans to control their behavior in a way that runs directly counter to the way the road has been designed (by the very state imposing the regulations!) to "read" as being high- or low-speed. Ideally, "speed limits" wouldn't be a regulatory cudgel at all; they'd just be an internal analytical calculation on the way to to figuring out how to design the road, so that it feels unsafe to go beyond the "speed limit" speed.
aaron695 7mo ago
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Atlas667 7mo ago
Tangentially, this is also the reason why many forms of corruption can be done away with right now with modern technology. Meaning that democratizing our existing political structures is a reality today and can be done effectively (think blockchain, think zero knowledge proofs). On the other hand, the political struggle to actually enact this new democratic system will be THE defining struggle of our times.
throwaway555121 7mo ago
> An interesting aspect of this, especially their blog post (https://malus.sh/blog.html https://malus.sh/blog.html ), is that it acknowledges a strain in our legal system I've been observing for decades, but don't think the legal system or people in general have dealt with, which is that generally costs matter. Former lawyer here, who worked at a top end law firm. Throwaway account. In my experience, the legal system and lawyers in general are deeply aware of this. It's the average Joe who fails to realize this, particularly a certain kind of Joe (older men with a strong sense that all rules are sacred, except those that affect them, those are all oppressive and corrupt and may possibly justify overthrowing the government). Laws are social norms of varying strength. There's the law (stern face) and then there's the law (vague raising of hands). If you owe a bank $2m and you pay back $1m, then you're going to run into the law (stern face). If you have an obligation to use your best efforts to do something, and you don't do it, then we can all have a very long conversation about what exactly 'best efforts' means in this exact scenario, and we're more in the territory of law (vague raising of hands). Administrative obligations are the vaguest of all, and that's where lawyers are genuinely most helpful. A good lawyer will know that Department so and so is shifting into harsher enforcement of this type of violation but is less concerned about that type of violation. They know that Justice so and so loves throwing the book in this kind of case, but rolls their eyes at that other kind of case. This is extremely helpful to you as a client. > And without very many people consciously realizing it, we have centuries of laws that were written with the subconscious realization that enforcement is difficult and expensive, and that the discretion of that enforcement is part of the power of the government. Blindly translating those centuries of laws into rigid, free enforcement is a terrible idea for everyone. Enforcement of laws is a political decision, and there is no way to ever escape this fact. If society gets concerned about something, politicians are going to mobilize old laws to get at it. If society relaxes about something, enforcement wanes. Drugs are an obvious example. A lot of the time the things society are concerned about are deeply stupid (is D&D satanic?), but in a democracy politicians are very sensitive to public sentiment. If you don't like the way the public debate is going, get involved. > Yet we still have almost no recognition that that is an issue. This could, perhaps surprisingly, be one of the first places we directly grapple with this in a legal case someday soon, that the legality of something may be at least partially influenced by the expense of the operation. The courts are only ever concerned about de jure legality. (It's the literal meaning of de jure!) There are other outlets for de facto legality in the legal system - e.g. the police can choose not to investigate, prosecutors can choose not to lay charges, or opt for lower-level charges, or seek a lenient sentence.
softgrow 7mo ago
To understand speeding you need to understand the concept of "speed choice". Everyone chooses how fast to drive, only those who choose above the speed limit are speeding. If your environment gets you to choose a speed below the speed limit you won't break the law. Your choice can be influenced by many factors such as: * narrow looking roadway * speed limit signs * your car has self driving * what everybody else is doing * speed limiter on your car * curvy road * bad weather * male or female * risk appetite * driving experience * experience of that route * perceived risk of getting caught If you fix "speed choice" the problem of speeding diminishes.
Barbing 7mo ago
Phenomenally illuminating, thank you.
jongjong 7mo ago
Yes, with current costs, most people literally cannot afford legal representation, especially in the plaintiff side. For example, I've been cheated out of at least $100k net worth by the founder of a crypto project because he decided to abandon tech which was working and switched to a competitor's platform for no reason. Now I was already worried about repercussions outside of the legal system... This is crypto sector after all... But also, legally, there's no way I can afford to sue a company which controls almost $100 million in liquid assets and probably has got government regulators on their payroll... Even though it is a simple case, it would be difficult to win even if I'm right and the risk of losing is that they could seek reimbursement of lawyers fees which they seek to maximize just to make things difficult for me.
jongjong 7mo ago
The legal system is fundamentally broken. It's not designed to handle the kind of throughput that is required to enforce justice in countries with many millions of inhabitants. The legal system is mostly a fantasy. It doesn't exist for most people. Currently it only serves large corporate and political interests since only they can afford access.
- Thiez 7mo ago
  Surely the number of people needed to maintain a reasonable throughput of the legal system scales approximately linearly with the number of offences? I don't see why a country of millions would be unable to have an efficient and functional legal system, even if the US does not.
dlenski 7mo ago
> This could, perhaps surprisingly, be one of the first places we directly grapple with this in a legal case someday soon, that the legality of something may be at least partially influenced by the expense of the operation. Well said. I think another area where this problem has already emerged is with public records laws. It's one thing if records of, let's say, real estate sales are made "publicly available" by requiring interested parties to physically visit a local government building, speak in the local language to other human beings in order to politely request them, and to spend a few hours and some money in order to actually get them. It's quite another thing if "publicly available" means that anyone anywhere can scrape those records off the web en masse and use them to target online scams at elderly homeowners halfway around the world.
bambax 7mo ago
My mom, who's a lawyer, always told us that laws don't matter, what matter is how hard they're enforced, and we can simply ignore laws that exist but we know for a fact they're not enforced (or not enforceable). I once had small talk with Lawrence Lessig after a conference of his, and when I told him that he was visibly shocked, as if I had told him I was raised to be a criminal. Now I'm not sure what to think anymore.
- Valodim 7mo ago
  The argument of your mother does seem to disregard moral aspects of breaking the law.
- grumbelbart2 7mo ago
  Your mother's advice sounds terribly selfish, honestly. Our society is pretty much build on the fact that most people are in some way "good" and will not break laws and rules even if they could get away with it. There are tons of stuff every day I could steal, knowing that any law I might break would not be enforceable simply because no one knew it was me. Littering in the forest. Dumping toxic materials into rivers. All that works because most people don't do it, only a few.
  - bambax 7mo ago
    Sure; I was generalizing; my mother never taught us that stealing or killing or even polluting was fine if we would not get caught! However I don't think I agree with your way of thinking. The reason we have laws is because people will not naturally do the right thing; otherwise laws and police would be entirely unnecessary, no?
phlakaton 7mo ago
Agree with all this, but am not sure how it applies to this case. This seems rather the opposite behavior: accelerated bad de facto behavior because de jure enforcement is infeasible. We are seeing this in the world of digital media, where frivolous DMCA and YouTube takedown reports are used indiscriminately and with seemingly little consequence to the bad actor. Corporations are prematurely complying with bad actors as a risk reduction measure. The de jure avenues to push back on this are weak, slow, expensive, and/or infeasible. So if you ask me what's the bigger threat right now, stricter or less strict enforcement, I'd argue that it's still generally the latter. Though in the specific case of copyright I'd like to see a bunch of the law junked, and temporal scope greatly reduced (sorry not sorry, Disney and various literary estates), because the de facto effects of it on the digital (and analog!) commons are so insidious.
- ndiddy 7mo ago
  I'd say it's neither, it's laws failing to keep pace with technological development. All the precedent around clean-room engineering implicitly assumes it'll be painstakingly done by a team of humans taking months or years of work. This means that while there is a way around copyright, the effort it takes to reimplement something poses enough of a barrier that complying with the license is the easier option in most cases. If we treat AI the same way we treat humans here, it means that the barrier is gone. Their blog post brings up the example of Phoenix Software's reimplementation of the IBM PC BIOS. It took a team of engineers 4 months to write the initial version of that work. The authors were able to produce their own clean-room PC BIOS with zero human involvement in less than an hour. Currently both of these are treated as being legally equivalent.
zezeh 7mo ago
I see many comments focusing on whether speed limits (or the law) should or should not be enforced, while the main idea in this post is to say that today any agreement can be measured to the dot. I agree with the author that we are not prepared for the consequences of such a change and that it can lead to abuse on many instances.

by jerf 7mo ago

JackYoustra 7mo ago

The answer to this is just changing the law as enforcement becomes different, instead of leaning on the rule of a few people to determine what the appropriate level of enforcement is. To do this, though, you're going to have to get rid of veto points! A bit hard in our disastrously constitutional system.

igor47 7mo ago

Dean Ball made this exact point on the Ezra Klein show a few days ago. I always thought laws would get more just with perfect enforcement -- the people passing mandatory sentencing laws for minor drug offenses would think twice if their own children, and not just minorities and unfavourable groups, were subject to the same consequences (instead of rehab or community service). But if I've learned anything in 20 years of software eng, it's that migration plans matter. The perfect system is irrelevant if you can't figure out how to transition to it. AI is dangling a beautiful future in front of us, but the transition looks... Very challenging

eru 7mo ago
Hmm, the problem is that judges and even police officers are generally saner than voters. Giving the former discretion was a way to sneakily contain the worst excesses of the latter. Alas, self-interest isn't really something voters seem to really take into account.
- lupire 7mo ago
  Judges and police officers have their own massive "worst excesses".
  - vkou 7mo ago
    They do, but letting mob rule decide criminal sanction is beyond fucked. See: Any discussion thread of literally any criminal being sentenced, receiving parole, or better yet, committing any crime after being released for serving a different one.
    - worthless-trash 7mo ago
      Its almost like they are sick of people commiting crimes.
wat10000 7mo ago
How many times have we seen politicians advocate for laws against something, then do a 180 when one of their kids does it? Even if you had that system, I don't think it would work the way you say. People are dumb and politicians are no exception.

parpfish 7mo ago

I think this distinction also gets at some issue with things like privacy and facial recognition. There’s the old approach of hanging a wanted poster and asking people to “call us if you see this guy”. Then there’s the new approach matching faces in a comprehensive database and camera networks. The later is just the perfect, efficient implementation of the former. But it’s… different somehow.

modeless 7mo ago

We should welcome more precise law enforcement. Imperfect enforcement is too easy for law enforcement officers to turn into selective enforcement. By choosing who to go after, law enforcement gets the unearned power to change the law however they want, enforcing unwritten rules of their choosing. Having law enforcement make the laws is bad. The big caveat, though, is that when enforcement becomes more accurate, the rules and penalties need to change. As you point out, a rigidly enforced law is very different from one that is less rigorously enforced. You are right that there is very little recognition of this. The law is difficult to change by design, but it may soon have to change faster than it has in the past, and it's not clear how or if that can happen. Historically, it seems like the only way rapid governmental change happens is by violent revolution, and I would rather not live in a time of violent revolution...

Twey 7mo ago
The problem with precise law enforcement is that the legal system is incredibly complex. There's a tagline that ‘everybody's a criminal’; I don't know if that's necessarily true but I do definitely believe that a large number of ‘innocent’ people are criminals (by the letter of the law) without their knowledge. Because we usually only bother to prosecute crimes if some obvious harm has been done this doesn't cause a lot of damage in practice (though it can be abused), but if you start enforcing the letter of every law precisely it suddenly becomes the obligation of every citizen to know every law — in a de facto way, rather than just the de jure way we currently have as a consequence of ‘ignorance of the law is no excuse’. So an increase of precision in law enforcement must be preceded by a drastic simplification of the law itself — not a bad thing by any means, but also not an easy (or, perhaps, possible) task.
- RobRivera 7mo ago
  Precise law enforcement would motivate political will to proactively law change to be more precise and appropriate, or tuned, to the public sentiment. Imprecise law enforcement enables political office holders to arbitrarily leverage the law to arrest people they label as a political enemy, e.g. Aaron Swartz. If everyone that ever shared publications outside the legal subscriber base was precisely arrested, charged, and punished, I dont think the punishment amd current legal terrain regarding the charges leveraged against him would have lasted. But this is a feature, not a bug.

Pannoniae 7mo ago

Yup :P As in their post: "The future of software is not open. It is not closed. It is liberated, freed from the constraints of licenses written for a world in which reproduction required effort, maintained by a generation of developers who believed that sharing code was its own reward and have been comprehensively proven right about the sharing and wrong about the reward." This applies to open-source but also very well to proprietary software too ;) Reversing your competitors' software has never been easier!

degamad 7mo ago
If they really believed that their process eliminated any licensing conditions, why would they limit themselves to open source projects? High quality decompilers have existed for a long time, and there's a lot more value in making a cleanroom implementation of Photoshop or Office than of Redis or Linux. Why go after such a small market? I suspect the answer us that they don't believe it's legal, they just think that they can get away with it because they're less likely to get sued. (I really suspect that they don't believe that at all, and it's all just a really good satire - after all, they blatantly called the company "EvilCorp" in Latin.)
- Pannoniae 7mo ago
  >If they really believed that their process eliminated any licensing conditions, why would they limit themselves to open source projects? Because this is satire by FOSS people :)

clickety_clack 7mo ago

De jure, there is no difference between de facto and de jure. De facto there is.

cuu508 7mo ago

> We are all making a continual and ongoing grave error > Blindly translating those centuries of laws into rigid, free enforcement is a terrible idea for everyone. I understand your point that changing the enforcement changes how the law is "felt" even though on the paper the law has not changed. And I think it makes sense to review and potentially revise the laws when enforcement methods change. But in the specific case of the 55 mph limit, would the consequences really be grave and terrible if the enforcement was enforced by a robot, but the law remained the same?

Ntrails 7mo ago
Yeah, I'd have to go slower???? Anyway. I come from the UK where we've had camera based enforcement for aeons. This of course actually results in people speeding and braking down to the limit as they approach the camera (which is of course announced loudly by their sat nav). The driving quality is frankly worse because of this, not better, and it certainly doesn't reduce incidence of speeding. Of course the inevitable car tracker (or average speed cameras) resolve this pretty well.
diacritical 7mo ago
> would the consequences really be grave and terrible if the enforcement was enforced by a robot The potential consequences of mass surveillance come to mind.
- cuu508 7mo ago
  OK, but that would be a consequence of the specific enforcement method, not a consequence the law becoming de facto stricter due to stricter enforcement.
lupire 7mo ago
For one thing, the speed limit is intentionally set 5-10mph too low, specifically to make it easier to prove guilt when someone breaks the "real" speed limit.
- JoshTriplett 7mo ago

pfortuny 7mo ago

Not exactly the same but at least in Spain, the cost of constructing a new building subject to all the regulations makes them completely unafforfable for low salaries. (There are other problems, I know, but the regulations are crazy).

cataphract 7mo ago
What's been driving up the cost of construction (it's already up to 2000-2400 eur/m2 for a detached house in Portugal) has been mostly cost of materials and labour. People complain about the regulations, but they also complain about houses that are structurally unsound, unventilated, flammable, badly isolated acoustically and thermally and so on... I don't think going back is the way to go. It's true that sometimes licensing that too long, though.
- pfortuny 7mo ago
  Yes, that is also true, of course. But then again, we have turned "security" into something absurd which only adds costs.

LeifCarrotson 7mo ago

Absolutely! We're not all making that error, I've been venting about it for years. "Costs matter" is one way to say it, probably a lot easier to digest and more popular than the "Quantity has a quality all it's own" quote I've been using, which is generally attributed to Stalin which is a little bit of a problem. But it's absolutely true! Flock ALPRs are equivalent to a police officer with binoculars and a post-it for a wanted vehicle's make, model, and license plate, except we can put hundreds of them on the major intersections throughout a city 24/7 for $20k instead of multiplying the police budget by 20x. A warrant to gather gigabytes of data from an ISP or email provider is equivalent to a literal wiretap and tape recorder on a suspect's phone line, except the former costs pennies to implement and the later requires a human to actually move wires and then listen for the duration. Speed cameras are another excellent example. Technology that changes the cost of enforcement changes the character of the law. I don't think that no one realizes this. I think many in office, many implementing the changes, and many supporting or voting for those groups are acutely aware and greedy for the increased authoritarian control but blind to the human rights harms they're causing.

seethishat 7mo ago

The issue with strictly enforcing the speed limit on roads is that sometimes, people must speed. They must break the law. Wife giving birth, rushing a wounded person to the ER, speeding to avoid a collision, etc. If we wanted to strictly enforce speed limits, we would put governors on engines. However, doing that would cause a lot of harm to normal people. That's why we don't do it. Stop and think about what it means to be human. We use judgement and decide when we must break the laws. And that is OK and indeed... expected.

arcticfox 7mo ago
The answer is not a governor but a speed camera, they have them all over in Brazil and they send you a ticket if you speed through them. Put an exception in the law for emergencies, provide an appeal process, and voila.
ahtihn 7mo ago
> sometimes, people must speed. They must break the law. Wife giving birth, rushing a wounded person to the ER, speeding to avoid a collision I would argue that only the last one is a valid reason because it's the only one where it's clear that not speeding leads to direct worse consequences. Speed limits don't exist just to annoy people. Speeding increases the risk of accident and especially the consequences of an accident. I don't trust people to drive well in a stressful situation, so why would it be a good idea to let them increase the risk by speeding. The worst part is that it's not even all that likely that the time saved by speeding ends up mattering.
- tekne 7mo ago
  E(accident due to going faster) vs E(worse outcome due to waiting) Your argument only makes sense if the only possible bad thing is a car accident -- to make my point clearer, would you take a 1% chance of losing 100$ to avoid a 50% chance of losing 10$? Depends how much money you have, but it can be a perfectly rational decision.
- tinier_subsets 7mo ago
  The “wife giving birth” exception for speeding is always so amusing to me. In the U.S., the average distance from a hospital is 10 miles (in a rural area). Assuming 55 mph speed limits, that means most people are 11 minutes from a hospital. Realistically, “speeding” in this scenario probably means something like 80 mph, so you cut your travel time to 7.5 minutes. In other words, you just significantly increased your chances of killing your about to be born kid, your wife, yourself, and innocent bystanders just to potentially arrive at a hospital 210 seconds sooner. Edit: the rushing someone to an ER scenario is possibly more ridiculous, since you can’t teleport yourself, and if the 3.5 minutes in the above scenario would make a difference, then driving someone to the ER is a significantly worse option than starting first aid while waiting for EMTs to arrive.

mlyle 7mo ago

> Cost of enforcement matters. The exact same nominal law that is very costly to enforce has completely different costs and benefits then that same law becoming all but free to rigidly enforce. Hey, I really like this framing. This is a topic that I've thought about from a different perspective. We have all kinds of 18th and 19th century legal precedents about search, subpoenas, plain sight, surveillance in public spaces, etc... that really took for granted that police effort was limited and that enforcement would be imperfect. But they break down when you read all the license plates, or you can subpoena anyone's email, or... whatever. Making the laws rigid and having perfect enforcement has a cost-- but just the baseline cost to privacy and the squashing of innocent transgression is a cost. (A counterpoint: a lot of selective law enforcement came down to whether you were unpopular or unprivileged in some way... cheaper and automated enforcement may take some of these effects away and make things more fair. Discretion in enforcement can lead to both more and less just outcomes).

tekne 7mo ago
I think the fundamental issue is that a form of equality where everyone gets what was previously the worst outcome is... probably worse.
- pocksuppet 7mo ago
  Many times when politicians get to suffer the full effects of their laws, the laws quickly change for the better.
miki123211 7mo ago
This is my problem with Americans and their "but the constitution" arguments. The U.S. constitution has been written in an age before phones, automatic and semi-automatic rifles (at least in common use), nuclear weapons, high-bandwidth communications networks that operate at lightning speed, mass media, unbreakable encryption and CCTV cameras.
- bombcar 7mo ago
  The problem is that "all sides" agree that if the constitution was written today, surprise, surprise, it'd totally agree with them; the gun control people are sure that the 2nd wouldn't cover military weapons, the gun lovers are sure that it would mandate tanks for everyone. But since having 300 million people have a detailed, nuanced discussion about anything is impossible, everyone works at the edges.

schoen 7mo ago

There was this scholarly article from Pamela Samuelson and Suzanne Scotchmer https://yalelawjournal.org/pdf/200_ay258cck.pdf https://yalelawjournal.org/pdf/200_ay258cck.pdf which, as I recall it, suggested that the copyright law effectively considered that it was good that there was a way around copyright (with reverse engineering and clean-room implementation), and also good that the way around copyright required some investment in its own right, rather than being free, easy, and automatic. I think Samuelson and Scotchmer thought that, as you say, costs matter, and that the legal system was recognizing this, but in a kind of indirect way, not overtly.

sweetjuly 7mo ago

This has also been a common theme in recent decades with respect to privacy. In the US, the police do not generally need a warrant to tail you as you go around town, but it is phenomenally expensive and difficult to do so. Cellphone location records, despite largely providing the same information, do require warrants because it provides extremely cheap, scalable tracking of anyone. In other words, we allow the government to acquire certain information through difficult means in hopes that it forces them to be very selective about how they use it. When the costs changed, what was allowed also had to change.

unreal37 7mo ago
I think of this in reverse. It's legal for the government to track mail - who sent a message, and who it's going to. They have access to the "outside of the envelope". But it's not legal for them to read the message inside. And this same principle allows them to build massive friend/connection networks of everyone electronically. The government knows every single person you've communicated with and how often you communicate with them. It was never designed for this originally.

kibwen 7mo ago

Seconded, thirded, fourthed. I spend a lot of time thinking about how laws, in practice, are not actually intended to be perfectly enforced, and not even in the usual selective-enforcement way, just in the pragmatic sense.

miki123211 7mo ago

And this goes both ways. Many governments around the world have entities to which you can write a letter, and those entities are frequently obligated to respond to that letter within a specific time frame. Those laws have been written with the understanding that most people don't know how to write letters, and those who do, will not write them unless absolutely necessary. This allows the regulators to be slow and operate by shuffling around inefficient paper forms, instead of keeping things in an efficient ticket tracking system. LLMs make it much, much easier to write letters, even if you don't speak the language and can only communicate at the level of a sixth-grader. Imagine what happens when the worst kind of "can I talk to your supervisor" Karen gets access to a sycophantic LLM, which tells her that she's "absolutely right, this is absolutely unacceptable behavior, I will help you write a letter to your regulator, who should help you out in this situation."

cortesoft 7mo ago
I have some lawyer friends, who work as internal council to companies, that are already experiencing this. People are cranking out legal requests and claims with LLMs and sending them to companies. Almost all of them are pretty much meaningless, and should be ignored. However, they legally can't just ignore them. They have to have someone review the claim, verify that it is bullshit, and then they can ignore it. That takes time, though. So people can generate and send millions of legal claim instantly, but the lawyers have to read them one by one. The asymmetry of effort is huge, and causes real issues.
- tirant 7mo ago
  They just need to implement a better LLM that is able to deal with all that crap. At the end we will just have agents interacting with each other.
  - cortesoft 7mo ago
    The problem is the legal liability is also asymmetrical. If the person making the bogus legal claims with the LLM messes up, the claim will just be dismissed and it isn't a big deal for the person making the claim. If the reading LLM messes up and classifies a real claim with the bogus ones, the company could have a major problem.

popalchemist 7mo ago

If you had to put a name to this phenomenon, what would it be?

encom 7mo ago

>https://malus.sh/blog.html https://malus.sh/blog.html An interesting read, however I'd like to know how to stop websites from screwing around with my scrollbars. In this case it's hidden entirely. Why is this even a thing websites are allowed to do - to change and remove browser UI elements? It makes no sense even, because I have no idea where I am on the page, or how long it is, without scrolling to the bottom to check. God I miss 2005.

tmoravec 7mo ago

Privacy protection has the exact same issue. Wiretapping laws were created at the time there was literally a detective listening to a private phone conversation as it was happening. Now we record almost everything online, and processing it is trivial and essentially free. The safeguards are the same but the scale of privacy invasion is many orders of magnitude different.

pessimizer 7mo ago

> Realistically, those are three completely different policies in every way that matters. I think that the failure to distinguish them is due to a really childish outlook on law and government that is encouraged by people who are simple-minded (because it is easy and moralistic) and by people who are in control of law and government (because it extends their control to social enforcement.) I don't think any discussion about government, law, or democracy is worth anything without an analysis of government that actually looks at it - through seeing where decisions are made, how those decisions are disseminated, what obligations the people who receive those decisions have to follow them and what latitude they have to change them, and ultimately how they are carried out: the endpoint of government is the application of threats, physical restraint, pain, or death in order to prevent people from doing something they wish to do or force them to do something they do not wish to do, and the means to discover where those methods should be applied. The police officer, the federal agent, the private individual given indemnity from police officers and federal agencies under particular circumstances, the networked cameras pointed into the streets are government. Government has a physical, material existence, a reach. Democracy is simpler to explain under that premise. It's the degree to which the people that this system controls control the decisions that this system carries out. The degree to which the people who control the system are indemnified from its effects is the degree of authoritarianism. Rule by the ungoverned. It's also why the biggest sign of political childishness for me are these sort of simple ideas of "international law." International law is a bunch of understandings between nations that any one of them can back out of or simply ignore at any time for any reason, if they are willing to accept the calculated risk of consequences from the nations on the other side of the agreement. It's like national law in quality, but absolutely unlike it in quantity. Even Costa Rica has a far better chance of ignoring, without any long-term cost, the mighty US trying to enforce some treaty regulation than you as an individual have to ignore the police department. Laws were constructed under this reality. If we hypothetically programmed those laws into unstoppable Terminator-like robots and told them to enforce them without question it would just be a completely different circumstance. If those unstoppable robots had already existed with absolute enforcement, we would have constructed the laws with more precision and absolute limitations. We wouldn't have been able to avoid it, because after a law was set the consequences would have almost instantly become apparent. With no fuzziness, there's no selective enforcement, but also no discretion (what people call selective enforcement they agree with.) If enforcement has blanket access and reach, there's also no need to make an example or deter. Laws were explicitly formulated around these purposes, especially the penalties set. If every crime was caught current penalties would be draconian, because they implicitly assume that everyone who got caught doing one thing got away with three other things, and for each person who was caught doing a thing three others got away with doing that thing. It punishes for crimes undetected, and attempts to create fear in people still uncaught.

derefr 7mo ago

> There is a difference between "putting up a sign that says 55 mph and walking away", "putting up a sign that says 55 mph and occasionally enforcing it with expensive humans when they get around to it", and "putting up a sign that says 55 mph and rigidly enforcing it to the exact mph through a robot". Nominally, the law is "don't go faster than 55 mph". Realistically, those are three completely different policies in every way that matters. ...and there's also a large difference between any of those three shifts, and the secular shift (i.e. through no change in regulatory implementation whatsoever!) that occurs when the majority of traffic begins to consist of autonomous vehicles that completely ignore the de facto flow-of-traffic speeds, because they've been programmed to rigorously follow the all laws, including posted de jure speed limits (because the car companies want to CYA.) Which is to say: even if regulators do literally nothing, they might eventually have to change the letter of the law to better match the de facto spirit of the law, lest we are overcome by a world of robotic "work to rule" inefficiencies. --- Also, a complete tangent: there's also an even-bigger difference between any of those shifts, and the shift that occurs when traffic calming measures are imposed on the road (narrowing, adding medians, adding curves, etc.) Speed limits are an extremely weird category of regulation, as they try to "prompt" humans to control their behavior in a way that runs directly counter to the way the road has been designed (by the very state imposing the regulations!) to "read" as being high- or low-speed. Ideally, "speed limits" wouldn't be a regulatory cudgel at all; they'd just be an internal analytical calculation on the way to to figuring out how to design the road, so that it feels unsafe to go beyond the "speed limit" speed.

aaron695 7mo ago

[dead]

Atlas667 7mo ago

Tangentially, this is also the reason why many forms of corruption can be done away with right now with modern technology. Meaning that democratizing our existing political structures is a reality today and can be done effectively (think blockchain, think zero knowledge proofs). On the other hand, the political struggle to actually enact this new democratic system will be THE defining struggle of our times.

throwaway555121 7mo ago

> An interesting aspect of this, especially their blog post (https://malus.sh/blog.html https://malus.sh/blog.html ), is that it acknowledges a strain in our legal system I've been observing for decades, but don't think the legal system or people in general have dealt with, which is that generally costs matter. Former lawyer here, who worked at a top end law firm. Throwaway account. In my experience, the legal system and lawyers in general are deeply aware of this. It's the average Joe who fails to realize this, particularly a certain kind of Joe (older men with a strong sense that all rules are sacred, except those that affect them, those are all oppressive and corrupt and may possibly justify overthrowing the government). Laws are social norms of varying strength. There's the law (stern face) and then there's the law (vague raising of hands). If you owe a bank $2m and you pay back $1m, then you're going to run into the law (stern face). If you have an obligation to use your best efforts to do something, and you don't do it, then we can all have a very long conversation about what exactly 'best efforts' means in this exact scenario, and we're more in the territory of law (vague raising of hands). Administrative obligations are the vaguest of all, and that's where lawyers are genuinely most helpful. A good lawyer will know that Department so and so is shifting into harsher enforcement of this type of violation but is less concerned about that type of violation. They know that Justice so and so loves throwing the book in this kind of case, but rolls their eyes at that other kind of case. This is extremely helpful to you as a client. > And without very many people consciously realizing it, we have centuries of laws that were written with the subconscious realization that enforcement is difficult and expensive, and that the discretion of that enforcement is part of the power of the government. Blindly translating those centuries of laws into rigid, free enforcement is a terrible idea for everyone. Enforcement of laws is a political decision, and there is no way to ever escape this fact. If society gets concerned about something, politicians are going to mobilize old laws to get at it. If society relaxes about something, enforcement wanes. Drugs are an obvious example. A lot of the time the things society are concerned about are deeply stupid (is D&D satanic?), but in a democracy politicians are very sensitive to public sentiment. If you don't like the way the public debate is going, get involved. > Yet we still have almost no recognition that that is an issue. This could, perhaps surprisingly, be one of the first places we directly grapple with this in a legal case someday soon, that the legality of something may be at least partially influenced by the expense of the operation. The courts are only ever concerned about de jure legality. (It's the literal meaning of de jure!) There are other outlets for de facto legality in the legal system - e.g. the police can choose not to investigate, prosecutors can choose not to lay charges, or opt for lower-level charges, or seek a lenient sentence.

softgrow 7mo ago

To understand speeding you need to understand the concept of "speed choice". Everyone chooses how fast to drive, only those who choose above the speed limit are speeding. If your environment gets you to choose a speed below the speed limit you won't break the law. Your choice can be influenced by many factors such as: * narrow looking roadway * speed limit signs * your car has self driving * what everybody else is doing * speed limiter on your car * curvy road * bad weather * male or female * risk appetite * driving experience * experience of that route * perceived risk of getting caught If you fix "speed choice" the problem of speeding diminishes.

Barbing 7mo ago

Phenomenally illuminating, thank you.

jongjong 7mo ago

Yes, with current costs, most people literally cannot afford legal representation, especially in the plaintiff side. For example, I've been cheated out of at least $100k net worth by the founder of a crypto project because he decided to abandon tech which was working and switched to a competitor's platform for no reason. Now I was already worried about repercussions outside of the legal system... This is crypto sector after all... But also, legally, there's no way I can afford to sue a company which controls almost $100 million in liquid assets and probably has got government regulators on their payroll... Even though it is a simple case, it would be difficult to win even if I'm right and the risk of losing is that they could seek reimbursement of lawyers fees which they seek to maximize just to make things difficult for me.

jongjong 7mo ago

The legal system is fundamentally broken. It's not designed to handle the kind of throughput that is required to enforce justice in countries with many millions of inhabitants. The legal system is mostly a fantasy. It doesn't exist for most people. Currently it only serves large corporate and political interests since only they can afford access.

Thiez 7mo ago
Surely the number of people needed to maintain a reasonable throughput of the legal system scales approximately linearly with the number of offences? I don't see why a country of millions would be unable to have an efficient and functional legal system, even if the US does not.

dlenski 7mo ago

> This could, perhaps surprisingly, be one of the first places we directly grapple with this in a legal case someday soon, that the legality of something may be at least partially influenced by the expense of the operation. Well said. I think another area where this problem has already emerged is with public records laws. It's one thing if records of, let's say, real estate sales are made "publicly available" by requiring interested parties to physically visit a local government building, speak in the local language to other human beings in order to politely request them, and to spend a few hours and some money in order to actually get them. It's quite another thing if "publicly available" means that anyone anywhere can scrape those records off the web en masse and use them to target online scams at elderly homeowners halfway around the world.

bambax 7mo ago

My mom, who's a lawyer, always told us that laws don't matter, what matter is how hard they're enforced, and we can simply ignore laws that exist but we know for a fact they're not enforced (or not enforceable). I once had small talk with Lawrence Lessig after a conference of his, and when I told him that he was visibly shocked, as if I had told him I was raised to be a criminal. Now I'm not sure what to think anymore.

Valodim 7mo ago
The argument of your mother does seem to disregard moral aspects of breaking the law.
grumbelbart2 7mo ago
Your mother's advice sounds terribly selfish, honestly. Our society is pretty much build on the fact that most people are in some way "good" and will not break laws and rules even if they could get away with it. There are tons of stuff every day I could steal, knowing that any law I might break would not be enforceable simply because no one knew it was me. Littering in the forest. Dumping toxic materials into rivers. All that works because most people don't do it, only a few.
- bambax 7mo ago
  Sure; I was generalizing; my mother never taught us that stealing or killing or even polluting was fine if we would not get caught! However I don't think I agree with your way of thinking. The reason we have laws is because people will not naturally do the right thing; otherwise laws and police would be entirely unnecessary, no?

phlakaton 7mo ago

Agree with all this, but am not sure how it applies to this case. This seems rather the opposite behavior: accelerated bad de facto behavior because de jure enforcement is infeasible. We are seeing this in the world of digital media, where frivolous DMCA and YouTube takedown reports are used indiscriminately and with seemingly little consequence to the bad actor. Corporations are prematurely complying with bad actors as a risk reduction measure. The de jure avenues to push back on this are weak, slow, expensive, and/or infeasible. So if you ask me what's the bigger threat right now, stricter or less strict enforcement, I'd argue that it's still generally the latter. Though in the specific case of copyright I'd like to see a bunch of the law junked, and temporal scope greatly reduced (sorry not sorry, Disney and various literary estates), because the de facto effects of it on the digital (and analog!) commons are so insidious.

ndiddy 7mo ago
I'd say it's neither, it's laws failing to keep pace with technological development. All the precedent around clean-room engineering implicitly assumes it'll be painstakingly done by a team of humans taking months or years of work. This means that while there is a way around copyright, the effort it takes to reimplement something poses enough of a barrier that complying with the license is the easier option in most cases. If we treat AI the same way we treat humans here, it means that the barrier is gone. Their blog post brings up the example of Phoenix Software's reimplementation of the IBM PC BIOS. It took a team of engineers 4 months to write the initial version of that work. The authors were able to produce their own clean-room PC BIOS with zero human involvement in less than an hour. Currently both of these are treated as being legally equivalent.

zezeh 7mo ago

I see many comments focusing on whether speed limits (or the law) should or should not be enforced, while the main idea in this post is to say that today any agreement can be measured to the dot. I agree with the author that we are not prepared for the consequences of such a change and that it can lead to abuse on many instances.