[_heimdall]

Its not a cop out. How can you as a citizen try to stay on the right side of the law when laws are horribly verbose, difficult to understand, and full of gray area?

I wouldn't expect a law to be absolutely 100% buttoned up but we're very, very far from that today.

[BoredPositron]

Laws are difficult to understand? Is it the first one you've read? Oh no you haven't read it... because the one we are talking about is pretty straight cut. Sorry but you are really not commenting in good faith here. It's just straw man argument after straw man argument.

It's just liberté and nothing else for you I guess.

[_heimdall]

For the average person, yes laws are absolutely difficult to understand. We wouldn't need to involve lawyers nearly as often if laws were easy to understand and the process, defined by laws, was clear.

It isn't just about liberté for me. The law in discussion here may be pretty straight cut with regards to understanding what's on the page, but not with understanding what power the government is actually granted or when/how it will be enforced. The whole point in this thread was that the law is unclear as to how the government will define content posted online that may turn out to be inaccurate as illegal and worthy of leading to prosecution.

Consider it this way - if you handed said law to 10 people in the UK, would they all walk away with the same understanding of where the line is that they shouldn't cross?

[BoredPositron]

Oh stop the straw man arguments ask 10 people on the street about traffic laws and you get the same results for what you are fishing now. Ofc everyone will know that a Red Light means stop but than there are more obscure ones like the "Move Over" law in the US which even varies between states.

[_heimdall]

How is this a straw mab argument? I'm not saying poll any random 10 people on what they currently know of laws already on the book, I'd expect that to end poorly.

With regards to this specific law being clear and understandable by those who must follow it, I'm proposing that asking 10 of those people to read it and they wouldn't agree what the law means and when it will be enforced. I don't see that being a straw man, though I could very well be missing something there.

[BoredPositron]

Because if you give traffic laws to 10 random people on the street to read they might understand the gist of it but not every detail.

[_heimdall]

Okay we may be getting to the cote of where we disagree, regardless of free speech issues.

Do you not see it as a problem for the average person to be unable to understand the laws they are meant to follow?

For me, that's a real problem. In the example of traffic laws, either the laws are important to keep us safe on the road and the fact that people can't understand the laws as written puts us all at risk. Alternatively, if we're happy enough with road safety despite the fact that people can't understand traffic laws then the laws aren't serving a purpose and aren't needed. On top of that, people will be at risk of being fined or imprisoned for breaking laws that they didn't realize they broke, even when they took the time to read and try to understand the laws.