Hacker News Reader

Comment by DavidAdams | Hacker News Reader

I'm sure that in legal circles, there are a whole host of similar "law hacking" examples. This seems like a particular ingenious approach. I'd be interested to learn about other circumstances where laws are creatively misused to achieve noble ends. (The examples where the law is misused for nefarious ends are too numerous to mention).

View on HN

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drzyma%C5%82a's_wagon

This reminds me of the tiny house movement that avoids building regulations w.r.t. minimize size and grid hookup by putting wheels on their semi-permanent houses.

It's not exactly a tiny house movement invention, the Roma have been doing this for a very long time. There are also tax advantages to having wheels attached to your house, in plenty of places that means you're not paying property tax for the dwelling.

> It's not exactly a tiny house movement invention, the Roma have been doing this for a very long time.

For very different reasons, and theirs aren't semi-permanent.

> in plenty of places that means you're not paying property tax for the dwelling.

Then again in plenty of places (at least in western europe) you must have a permanent residence, so a mobile dwelling (whether an RV or a boat) can only be a secondary residence.

Also related to buildings, but in this case to avoid taxation - in the UK there was a "window tax", designed to be a progressive tax (the wealthier you are, the bigger your house, the more windows you have, the more tax you pay). To pay less tax, lots of people bricked up some of their windows so that the tax would go down without living in a smaller building. Now days that tax has been replaced in the UK by council tax, which is still progressive but based on house valuations rather than counting windows. You can still see some remnants of the tax avoidance, though, such as http://knowledgeoflondon.com/images/windowtax.jpg

Of course, these are ends that are only now being seen as noble instead of nefarious. It was necessary because same-sex relationships were viewed as deviant and sinister for so long.

What's an interesting question is why this was so widely accepted and tolerated by judges/social workers, in an era where same-sex relationships were otherwise treated so punitively.

The GPL in particular, and Copyleft in general, have been described as "viral" licenses because of the way they spread and perpetuate themselves.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com