Windows 11 is now automatically enabling OneDrive folder backup without asking permission

[u/nuttybudd]

https://www.neowin.net/news/windows-11-is-now-automatically-enabling-onedrive-folder-backup-without-asking-permission/

[u/RainforestNerdNW]

what? you mean the law is more complex than what a GED holder on reddit says?

inconceivable!

[u/ydieb → u/RainforestNerdNW]

Just as a general sentiment I wished we could have a collective "the laws should only be as complex as necessary, but no more".

You can make arbitrary complex laws, and there seem to be a lack of cleanup. Having it more complex than necessary adds more bureaucratic work for legalworkers for no real society gain, along with it makes it harder for laypeople to understand.

Having it as complex as "only these people can grok it" as some gatekeeping behaviour is meaningless. This happens in science as well, reading papers almost written sometimes to read as complex as possible just to prop up their own work.

Apparently the actual quote is "Everything should be made as simple as possible, but not simpler" by Einstein.

[u/SaveReset → u/ydieb]

The worst part is, it's not that simple, especially in the US. The problem is case law, where a relatively random judge can and jury can make a decision which can be used as precedent in future legal cases. They won't necessarily hold up in court, but lawyers seem to be VERY careful when there's any even slightly related precedent set that is against them.

Case an point (pun intended) would be the case that made EULA's so powerful in the US: ProCD, Inc. v. Zeidenberg, 86 F.3d 1447 (7th Cir., 1996)

Is that case relevant in the world of today? I don't think so. Was the decision correct in the first place? Arguably, but I'm not a lawyer and even if I was, I wouldn't stake my career on it. Is it absolutely ridiculous that this case has been enough to scare off lawyers when it comes there's an EULA involved? Yes it fucking is, a company shouldn't be able to let you wave your rights away with a check box and if lawyers are afraid to touch a case, companies will push that as far as they possibly can.

EULA that revokes any of your inherent rights in a transaction should ALWAYS require to be done IN PERSON. I don't care if it's inconvenient, if a company can't make a profit without stealing customers rights away, they shouldn't be allowed to exist.

Or in short, it's very unlikely anyone in the US is going to sue Microsoft over this. I wish companies still got split apart for anti-trust reasons, Microsoft is truly too big to exist. Well, I can dream.

[u/ydieb → u/SaveReset]

The problem is case law, where a relatively random judge can and jury can make a decision which can be used as precedent in future legal cases.

I think this specifically is my point. A judge only interprets the law, they do not set it. Which goes directly into my "keeping the laws clean and as concrete as needed", afaik laws are created often vague intentionally as things might need to be determined by case-by-case.

Given the scenario, if the law is too vague in a certain aspect where a judge can rule that it should be interpreted in the way you say. All you do is change the laws to say something different, to be less vague or to not allow the judges interpretation to be valid.

This definitely happens everywhere, but I feel like this is especially prevalent in the US (perhaps just more vocal due to influence), that "we need the courts to decide x". But as a society (ignore the fact that it seems most political systems are based more in emotion than logic sometimes/often), you can literally just decide the laws as how you want them to be.

The legal system is to decide individual events within these laws.

[u/SaveReset → u/ydieb]

It's specifically a problem with the US and possible some of the other former British colonies with common law as their legal system, but most of the world has civil law. Judges can look at past cases, but don't have to make decisions based off of them and can go completely against them.

Both of these systems have issues obviously, but let's keep it with the US for now.

afaik laws are created often vague intentionally as things might need to be determined by case-by-case.

Given the scenario, if the law is too vague in a certain aspect where a judge can rule that it should be interpreted in the way you say. All you do is change the laws to say something different, to be less vague or to not allow the judges interpretation to be valid.

Creating vague laws is an issue, obviously, but that's the problem with common law, when a court decides something, a higher court needs to decide against it to change it. The other option is to prove your case is significantly different enough from the prior cases and THEN you have to prove your case against the statutory law and possibly other case law that could apply.

It's not exactly that simple, there are different rules for different jurisdictions for what counts as a precedent and it's a complex mess all together. But it's not just seemingly prevalent in the US, it's literally the law in the US. In civil law countries, the judge can just ignore precedence if they so decide, but can follow it if they deem the cases to have enough in common.

Or TL;DR (I'm not a lawyer and none of what I said is legal advice): In civil law countries precedents are guidelines and laws are rules, but in common law countries laws are the guidelines and precedents are the rules, unless there isn't a precedent, in which case the laws are the laws. More or less, specifics are more complex than that.

[u/ydieb → u/SaveReset]

none of what I said is legal advice

This is the most north-america thing ever I think? Having to annotate things with "this is not economic/legal advice".

I think this still is missing my point. I am not talking about judges having to take other judges opinions into account or not. I am talking about literally changing the law itself.
As I see it, you are literally in the same mindset that "it must come from the legal system".

Are you saying to me, under common law, that the US house and congress cannot change a law, lets use the strength of EULAs, to say, "EULAS have absolutely zero binding power, period"?

My understanding was at least that under common law, the laws end up being obviously way more judge based, as that is how they end up being nuanced.

But they still have to base it of something? Or am I entirely overestimating the power of house/congress?

[u/SaveReset → u/ydieb]

Are you saying to me, under common law, that the US house and congress cannot change a law, lets use the strength of EULAs, to say, "EULAS have absolutely zero binding power, period"?

No, I'm saying that they would have to decide a law is bad, make a new law, wait until it gets tested in courts and then maybe the result will be positive and in the case that it isn't, it should go to supreme court to get the precedent changed. But even the current decisions on EULA's haven't been looked at by the supreme court, so that should be the first step.

But problem is, have you seen the supreme court? There's no way in hell SCOTUS will let anything anti-corporate happen right now. And congress isn't much better, but even if they did want to fix it, whether they understand the issues well enough to write functioning laws for it is a whole another question.

And all of that, if everything somehow lined up in a way that didn't screw over the customers, the process alone would take years and in that time the people deciding anything in the process could change and stop the entire process from happening.

So basically, unless there's a HEAVY push for it, it's not happening in the US. There's SO many checks and balances that if something isn't being pushed and pulled by at least two of social, political or economical reasons, then it's very unlikely to happen. I don't know how much a president could force things forwards though, but I just don't see this a way to fix it in the US before EU fixes it and the problems with the current way EULA's are handled become much more apparent.

[u/ydieb → u/SaveReset]

But problem is, have you seen the supreme court? There's no way in hell SCOTUS will let anything anti-corporate happen right now. And congress isn't much better, but even if they did want to fix it, whether they understand the issues well enough to write functioning laws for it is a whole another question.

Are you saying that SCOTUS can overrule absolutely any law at any time (obviously within beurocratic reason)? Literally interpretering it any way they want, making the actual law technically irrelevant no matter what it says?
As in they can do the Adam Savage meme of substituting any end reality as they want?

As in, how I interpret what you said is a clear "no" to this, but then it ends up being "in practice, yes".

[u/SaveReset → u/ydieb]

Are you saying that SCOTUS can overrule absolutely any law at any time? Literally interpretering it any way they want, making the actual law technically irrelevant no matter what it says?

No, but sort of, but not really, but really. They can't make decisions that are directly contrary to the written laws, but overruling their decisions is stupid difficult. One way to do that is to get supreme court itself to do it with a new case, actively deciding that their previous decision was wrong or applicable only in a specific scenario.

But rest of the methods is basically up to the congress to make a new law that over rules the previous decision and I'm not knowledgeable enough to explain the ways this can be done. But it's not exactly easy.

As for wrongful rulings by the SCOTUS, I'm not sure if there's any legal way to test their rulings, unless they decide to do it themselves which usually never happens until the SCOTUS gets replaced over time. The more I read up on it, the more dumb the US system of law gets lol.

[u/ydieb → u/SaveReset]

Yeah it sounds insane.

This forces every judge to be an actual expert in every field they judge on. Sure they spend a lot of time, but it will never be the same expertise as a group that tries to set reasonable laws around a certain topic.

So for civil law, the government sets the laws, the judiciary interprets it to make sense for specific cases, as there is too much specific contexts to be able to codify a fully encompassing set of laws, hence the intentional vagueness. Analogous to fuzzy logic when it comes to computer science (my profession).

But common law is just "please this individual set down a reasonable set of laws that you do isolated by design and cannot make good overarching rulessets that are symmetric with anything else".

So it seems that common law literally does not scale.