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Comment by EarlKing | Hacker News Reader

The truly aggravating part is that if they really wanted to thumb their noses at the Attorney General's office and get away with it there's a pretty straightforward way to do it: Fork every single project they want to offer through their operating system and thereby become a first-party developer-distributor thereof. AB 1043 is worded in such a way that it really doesn't apply if the operating system developer doesn't provide a covered application store (see 1798.501(a)(1)). This should apply in every other such app store accountability act in every other state (save Texas, since this is the text they seemed to adopt after the Texas law was challenged). Instead, all they're going to accomplish is getting pimpslapped by the Attorney General's office.

Maybe they're interested in performative noncompliance, but I'm not. I'd rather engage in creative and effective noncompliance.

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The site makes it very clear that the purpose is very explicitly not to "get away with it", it's to try and get fined, presumably to then challenge the legality of the laws in a higher court.

They argue that they are a coverd application store.

'Definition: "Covered Application Store" '"Covered application store" means a publicly available internet website, software application, online service, or platform that distributes and facilitates the download of applications from third-party developers to users of a computer, a mobile device, or any other general purpose computing device that can access a covered application store or can download an application. — Cal. Civ. Code § 1798.500(e)(1) 'This website is a "publicly available internet website" that "distributes and facilitates the download of applications" (specifically: a bash script) "to users of a general purpose computing device." We are also a covered application store. Debian's APT repositories are covered application stores. The AUR is a covered application store. Any mirror hosting .deb files is a covered application store. GitHub is a covered application store. Your friend's personal website with a download link to their weekend project is a covered application store.'

Yes, I know that. I'm saying this is utterly futile and if they really wanted to accomplish something they'd structure themselves as I described above. If their goal is to highlight the absurdity of the law... they won't actually accomplish anything. The Attorney General is not going to magically decide this was a terrible idea and reverse course. If they want to change the law then this isn't the way to do it either. If they want to ensure business as usual then what I propose is one way to do that.

Generally the point is for these things to go to court to be struck down or otherwise limited. This is a valid and regularly used means to change the law. You seem to think that you are aware of how the legislations definition will be applied, but that is not known until these things are taken to court.

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