[Sloowms]

I'm not sure what society you are referring to but contracts have to adhere to laws in the EU.

This is also about software that is being updated. So the transaction is not completed yet. Apple could probably go the route of not providing the update to phones that were sold before the law was voted on/in place. I would guess that would lead to other legal battles.

[dmitrygr]

And is it reasonable that the laws are created after the contract was already agreed to and still apply to it? At least here in the United States, laws are not allowed to make things illegal that happened before the laws were written.

[toast0]

If I have a sales contract with you where I will gladly pay you Tuesday for a hamburger today, and on Monday hamburgers are outlawed, I still owe you on Tuesday. If purchases or hamburgers on credit is outlawed on Monday, I most likely still owe you on Tuesday.

Otoh, if I pay you today for a hamburger on Tuesday, and on Monday hamburgers are outlawed, you can't perform your part of the contract, and we'll need to figure things out.

The rules can change, and when the rules change, continuing service may need to change (depending on how the rules were written); I'm sure part of the contracts involved also describe a) how to make changes in the services, b) what happens when parts of the contract are discovered to be unenforcable or illegal.

[makeitdouble]

Laws can definitively be retroactive or affect existing contracts. Imagine a world where governments have no power to stop anti-social behavior if it was ever baked into private contracts ?

Also the DMA didn't fall from the sky one day and enforced the next. Every business impacted had years to do something about it, and they preferred to play chicken race instead.

[dmitrygr]

> Imagine a world where governments have no power to stop anti-social behavior

They DO have the power to STOP it, they just cannot punish past behaviour which was legal at the time! At least in USA, this is directly in the constitution:

Article 1 § 9 prohibits Congress from passing any laws which apply ex post facto.

Article 1 § 10 prohibits the states from passing any laws which apply ex post facto.

SCOTUS also clarified this in Beazell v. Ohio:

"It is settled, by decisions of this Court so well known that their citation may be dispensed with, that any statute which punishes as a crime an act previously committed, which was innocent when done, which makes more burdensome the punishment for a crime, after its commission, or which deprives one charged with crime of any defense available according to law at the time when the act was committed, is prohibited as ex post facto."

Now, I know that this is EU and not USA, but my argument is that EU is the ones being unreasonable here. It is illogical to make something illegal and then punish those who had done it before it was made so.