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Comment by Agustus | Hacker News Reader

If politicians could focus their efforts on actually solving problems instead of giving hand outs to their tort lawyer buddies, we might get a better system.

The lawsuits would include:

- autoplay of gifs vs web videos

- does Pinterest count as an auto scroll ad

- does an endless scroll populated with 50% real content count as non-ad?

The law will just create more headaches for the producers and less innovation thanks to having to fight lawsuits.

Example of the depths lawyers can class action: Godiva is being sued in court for putting “Godiva 1927” on the label; the lawyer is arguing that people believe that the chocolate was made in 1927.

*edited the content away from ideas.

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Unless there are two cases, the Godiva lawsuit is actually for putting "Belgium 1926" on the label and the argument is primarily that the chocolate is not made in Belgium or of Belgian quality. I didn't find any discussion of 1926 in the filing. https://www.faruqilaw.com/case/183/hesse-et-al-v-godiva-choc...

Outlawing X doesn't mean almost-X is completely fine. That said, none of your examples make much sense (to me).

> - autoplay of gifs vs web videos

Presumably the content is what matters, not the particular compression format. Does it show animated content continuously without being triggered by active user interaction? Yes, so it's an auto-playing video.

> - does Pinterest count as an auto scroll ad

It's primarily focused on a call to action, so yes, it's an ad. Would they show an equivalent popup for ordinary user-generated content that they have no stake in?

> - does an endless scroll populated with 50% real content count as non-ad?

Is there an ad that appears when the user scrolls? I don't even see what this example was supposed to demonstrate.

> The law will just create more headaches for the producers and less innovation thanks to having to fight lawsuits.

More headaches and less innovation in how to sell bullshit sounds like a very positive outcome to me.

> Presumably the content is what matters, not the particular compression format. Does it show animated content continuously without being triggered by active user interaction? Yes, so it's an auto-playing video.

By that logic a loading spinner is an auto-playing video. Does me logging in count as "active user interaction" for showing me a loading spinner? I didn't request the spinner, I requested access to my skype chats.

The spinner fulfils a purpose (by notifying you that the content is still not quite ready) and is temporary (it goes away once the content is loaded). That said, you could always just replace it with a static "Loading.." label.

Plus, it's not exactly "content".

A spinner isn't a "video", it's just a moving graphic.

Our legal system has many problems, but one problem it thankfully doesn't have is catering to ridiculous pedantry like you find with software programmers. Anyone trying to argue spinners in front of a judge is going to have their case dismissed with prejudice, because clearly the intent of the law wasn't to ban spinners or other such UI elements.

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