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Comment by gbalduzzi | Hacker News Reader

> If a law being enforced 100% of the time causes problems then rethink the law (i.e. raise the speed limit, or design the road slower).

Isn't this the point of the whole conversation we are having here?

Laws on copyright were not created for current AI usage on open source project replication.

They need to change, because if they are perfectly enforced by the letter, they result in actions that are clearly against the intent of the law itself.

The underlying problem is that the world changes too fast for the laws so be fair immediately

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What would really help is for people to understand that that's the "spirit of the law" and the "letter of the law".

People don't want the letter of the law enforced, they want the spirit. Using the example from above, speed limits were made for safety. They were set at a time and surprise, cars got safer. So people feel safer driving faster. They're breaking the letter of the law but not the spirit.

I actually like to use law as an example of the limitations of natural languages. Because legalese is an attempt to formalize natural language, yet everyone seems to understand how hard it is to write good rules and how easy it is to find loopholes. But those are only possible if you enforce the letter of the law. Loopholes still exist but are much harder to circumvent with the spirit of the law. But it's also more ambiguous, so not without faults. You have to use some balance.

>cars have gotten safer

For their inhabitants, maybe not pedestrians though. Speeding laws are in part for protecting pedestrians

In general cars have also gotten safer for pedestrians[0]. Modern cars are lighter and made of plastic. There's better visibility, sensors, and for most vehicles the shape of the car has improved things.

American trucks are an interesting counter example but that's a more complicated issue. (The source has a comment that you can infer this being a concern with trucks but there's also a lot of sources on this that you can easily find)

[0] https://www.fox7austin.com/news/data-40-year-high-auto-ped-d...

^This. A large % of jurisprudence is in just trying to keep up with how tech disrupts society.

The reason that has to be done is precisely that the law has no common, well-architected rationale. The vast majority of law in common-law jurisdictions is ad hoc precedent from decades or centuries ago, patchwork laws that match current, ephemeral intuition about what the law should be, etc. Perfect and inevitable enforcement makes this situation a nightmare, given the expectation that the average US citizen commits multiple felonies per day. Something will have to give.

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