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Comment by patio11 | Hacker News Reader

2.9% plus 30 cents a transaction wouldn't buy a lot of loyalty from me, either. If the Internet cheering squad sent them six figures, that would just about cover what it cost to ring legal and schedule, but not actually run, a meeting to decide what to do about this. Legal would, predictably, say that Paypal was not in the business of taking on risk for people whose business model is trolling Joe Lieberman.

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> 2.9% plus 30 cents a transaction wouldn't buy a lot of loyalty from me, either.

And here I was thinking you were a man of principles ;)

> If the Internet cheering squad sent them six figures, that would just about cover what it cost to ring legal and schedule, but not actually run, a meeting to decide what to do about this.

I think the French company OVH went about this the right way, the first thing they did upon finding out that they had wikileaks as a customer they went to a judge to get a ruling.

PayPal could have done the same thing easily.

I am a man of principles. Your mistaken assumption is that they are your principles. :)

Do you think a payment provider owes their users exactly as much loyalty as big are the fees they have collected from them?

Because this is what your comment suggests, and that's a rather unprincipled statement in my book, whatever your principles are. For example, if Paypal acted by this statement, they would allow payment for porn as long as it was profitable for them.

f(x,y) evaluating to X for some x=X does not imply f(x,y) = x.

You must have missed my ;) in that bit, it was a reference to this thread:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1949965

France has a different legal system. Under British Common Law (which the US follows) I don't know of any way to get a preemptive ruling that you're in the clear. The best you can do is get a legal opinion from lawyers who, being personally liable for their answers and knowing that judges don't always do what they think judges should do, are always going to suggest the most cautious course of action.

In US civil law this is known as declaratory judgement http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Declaratory_judgment. I know of no equivalent in criminal law.

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