Totally, when I first started learning and caring more about the law I came up with all these clever hacks around various legal agreements and laws... Luckily for me I had friends who went to Law School to explain to me that the law is primarily about intent and most of my hacks weren't loopholes but instead plainly in the wrong and would be dealt with in court if they hadn't already through case law. I think its pretty common for hackers to look at legal agreements like a series of boolean statements that can be solved... sadly it doesn't work that way. Law is complicated :/

Law works the way we want computer programming to work. That is to say, "Do what I meant, not what I coded".

I think we get the impression that it's not that way based on our perception of corporations driving money-filled trucks through legal loopholes, but it's just not the same thing to a judge. Regardless of whether it is to you and I.

>I think we get the impression that it's not that way based on our perception of corporations driving money-filled trucks through legal loopholes

I get the impression that not everyone is playing by the same set of rules, not that they have particularly clever lawyers (although, most of them probably have that as well).

Is this true only in common law jurisdictions (most of the USA and UK), rather than civil law jurisdictions (Louisiana, Europe)?

Well, as a good software-engineer-and-qualified-lawyer friend of mine has said, "the power of the law is in its capacity for vagueness".

I often wish law was written more like a computer program, with lots of unit tests up front. But I have no idea how to actually achieve that. Real life is so much more complex than input to any computer program that an attempt to formalise law even more than it already is formalised would just result in it being totally incomprehensible to the people who have to follow it (as opposed to mostly). Plus the man on the street tends to get very angry when people who are "obviously" guilty get off on a technicality.

The real issue is that in programming, you get to define stuff unambiguously and quantitatively.

Take a law like: No driving a motor vehicle in the park.

Obviously that means no cars, but does a wheelchair count? How about a power assisted bike?

And those signs aren't even what was intended. "Motor vehicle"? Oh, okay, then my Nissan Leaf is not allowed because it has an electric motor, but my motorcycle is okay because it uses an gasoline engine, not a motor.

But I know what they meant, and keep my motorcycle off the bicycle trail. However, the pedant and software developer in me is bothered just a little when I read those signs.

You can probably find an online copy of the city ordinances that specify exactly what "motor vehicle" means in that context. An interesting thing I noticed in one city is that it's technically illegal to drive certain (stock, unmodified) models of car above 3000RPM due to noise ordinances prohibiting exhaust bypass systems.

> motorcycle

I've always thought a good starting point would be to hook up Watson or similar software up to LexisNexis or Westlaw. Would be lovely to run a new ToS or Privacy Policy through such software and see where it breaks down.

Watson isn't smart enough. That's like asking Waston to write code for you.

Canaries still work, though, don't they?

I.e. put up a cryptographically signed and timestamped statement that you haven't received a request, then don't update it (or simply take it down) once you receive a request.

Don't some open source projects do this?

Canaries are not well-settled in law [https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2014/04/warrant-canary-faq].

Correct. However: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6680780 or: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8337001

Another law of successful (or at least apparently effective) "law hacking": http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pretty_Good_Privacy#Criminal_in...

Common law systems really aren't as simple as "only intent matters, absolutely nothing clever is tolerated", as many suggest. The problem is mostly that, whenever computers are involved, people involved in the justice system seem to have their sensibilities bizarrely warped. Removing the technological element is likely the best way to get people to think about things sensibly. It is not so much "legal trickery" as it is "framing the matter in terms that the court already understands".

I've always thought that law attempts to assert its primacy over law by ignoring it.

You can do it right now by embedding such message in Bitcoin blockchain. It will give you tamper-proof and timestamped message.

A bit easier is to simply include a news headline in the signed message:

http://www.rsync.net/resources/notices/canary.txt

It's not as sophisticated as the blockchain, etc., but about as good - if you pick sensitive pieces of financial news it's clear you could not have known about them in advance. Or sports results.