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The civil legal system is supposed to be the correct way for an injured party to recover losses from the party causing the injury. Sadly, this doesn't always wo

by growse 12y ago

The civil legal system is supposed to be the correct way for an injured party to recover losses from the party causing the injury. Sadly, this doesn't always work as effectively as it should. Probably because lawyers.

dragonwriter 12y ago
> The civil legal system is supposed to be the correct way for an injured party to recover losses from the party causing the injury. Sadly, this doesn't always work as effectively as it should. Probably because lawyers. Even if you assume away any problems caused through either ill intent or simple not being perfectly omniscient by lawyers, judges, and jurors (all of whom can cause failures in the civil legal system), the impossibility of that system being a complete mechanism for recompense lies, among other places, in the fact that it is possible for the liable party to have caused harms to the injured party that the liable party is not capable of compensating. The harms a person is capable of doing are not limited by their capacity to pay -- someone with no assets can do an injury causing millions of dollars of property damage.
rqebmm 12y ago
It's kind of unfair to target lawyers in cases like this. The real problem is combination of a patchwork legal system and powerful people's willingness to exploit it for personal gain. Lawyers are just the _means_ by which those people exploit the system. They're also the means by which people who are wronged can get justice, so they're exploitation agnostic.
- polarix 12y ago
  They're not agnostic -- they tie the probability of proper representation directly to capital capacity.
  - pdabbadabba 12y ago
    Right. Which, in the case of a massive data breach, would tend to cause them to line up behind the potential plaintiffs, not the defendant. In reality, in cases like this, both sides will have top notch representation. (The problem, of course, is that there are cases where the stakes are non-monetary, or the plaintiff places a much greater value on a relatively small amount of money than a lawyer would...but I don't think that's really what we're talking about here.)
higherpurpose 12y ago
Also because companies try to remove all liability of their own when you sign the contract with them. Didn't both Sony and Microsoft update their EULAs so that you can't sue them - like at all? Sure, stuff like this may not hold in Court. But it may. Or at least it makes it extremely difficult to have someone sue them.
- davidgerard 12y ago
  They can't get their duty to employees signed away that easily.

by growse 12y ago

dragonwriter 12y ago

> The civil legal system is supposed to be the correct way for an injured party to recover losses from the party causing the injury. Sadly, this doesn't always work as effectively as it should. Probably because lawyers. Even if you assume away any problems caused through either ill intent or simple not being perfectly omniscient by lawyers, judges, and jurors (all of whom can cause failures in the civil legal system), the impossibility of that system being a complete mechanism for recompense lies, among other places, in the fact that it is possible for the liable party to have caused harms to the injured party that the liable party is not capable of compensating. The harms a person is capable of doing are not limited by their capacity to pay -- someone with no assets can do an injury causing millions of dollars of property damage.

rqebmm 12y ago

It's kind of unfair to target lawyers in cases like this. The real problem is combination of a patchwork legal system and powerful people's willingness to exploit it for personal gain. Lawyers are just the _means_ by which those people exploit the system. They're also the means by which people who are wronged can get justice, so they're exploitation agnostic.

polarix 12y ago
They're not agnostic -- they tie the probability of proper representation directly to capital capacity.
- pdabbadabba 12y ago
  Right. Which, in the case of a massive data breach, would tend to cause them to line up behind the potential plaintiffs, not the defendant. In reality, in cases like this, both sides will have top notch representation. (The problem, of course, is that there are cases where the stakes are non-monetary, or the plaintiff places a much greater value on a relatively small amount of money than a lawyer would...but I don't think that's really what we're talking about here.)

higherpurpose 12y ago

Also because companies try to remove all liability of their own when you sign the contract with them. Didn't both Sony and Microsoft update their EULAs so that you can't sue them - like at all? Sure, stuff like this may not hold in Court. But it may. Or at least it makes it extremely difficult to have someone sue them.

davidgerard 12y ago
They can't get their duty to employees signed away that easily.