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Comment by henrydark | Hacker News Reader

Some laws were put into place before the current internet scale was imagined and would probably not be made today

Internet scale companies like Google happily embrace intellectual property laws when it's their IP on the line, they just don't care about anyone else's. And it's not an issue of "can't scale": Google's ad revenue is bigger than the entire GDP of Kentucky--they could literally hire 1% of the US population to work in fraud management and still turn a profit.

How would you manage a fraud department of 3 million people?

So it’s a valid defense to say complying with the law is hard, that’s why I didn’t?

Shouldn’t the right course be to change the law before taking such actions?

Indeed. Saying: “Obeying the law doesn’t scale.” is an admission of guilt with pre-meditated intent to break the law. I keep hoping the courts will drive that point home at some point.

If you lead with the big ask, you frame the entire conversation around it. One should always start one's argument with question-begging, and disqualify people who don't accept the question begging as not serious about having a discussion.

"The laws are impossible to follow at scale. How do we fix that."

Or as a thinktank feeds it to a speechwriter to a politician: "Our antiquated laws have failed to keep up with the speed of technological development, and are now becoming an active handicap on progress. We need a set of laws that are as forward-thinking as our best selves hope to be, and a set of legislators that are responsive to the energy and creativity of the young while respecting the intelligence and hard-earned wisdom of the old."

I think politicians might even be willing to try to do that, but I doubt that regular people would be on board with that. This would most likely involve permitting a lot of things in society that we consider immoral right now (or at least objectionable to some extent).

If you tried to buy ads claiming to be Google.com but pointing to shadyweb.xyzjsiebsk.net you'd find out real quick that Google's legal ability scales just fine

Waiting for the law to change doesn't scale. Gotta be an asynchronous call. Just epoll the legislators.

I don't think "move fast, break things" meant the law, did it?

Of course that's not a valid defense.

It's not uncommon to evaluate the value of enforcing the law. DAs do it all the time.

It's absolute BS. If a citizen were to come into a court and were to express the quantity of state and federal laws, those which compete with each other, and beg the court forgiveness based on, "There's so many laws I can't possibly be made to keep track of them not to mention the laws that are no longer actively exercised in courts" they'd laugh at you.

A corporation like Google does it and the court agrees. Corporations are not people in the worst way possible.

it depends on your lawyer and on your face/outfit really

Which is also weird, because it is a far better reason for an individual than for a corporation. An individual is limited to their own time and expertise, whereas a corporation is only limited by their willingness to hire additional workers and expertise.

Your business doesn't have an inherent right to scale

That's still the exact same dystopian take: complying with the law is too hard for Google so the law should change to the detriment of smaller entities.

Then your business is not actually scalable.

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