alt Hacker News> It defines operating system in the law.
No, it doesn't.
It defines the following terms: "account holder", "age bracket data", "application", "child", "covered application store", "developer", "operating system provider", "signal", and "user".
> This wouldn’t apply to embedded systems and WiFi routers and traffic lights and all those things. It applies to operating systems that work with associated app stores on general purpose computers or mobile phones or game consoles.
Presumably, this based on reading the language that in the definition of "operating system developer", and then for some reason adding in "game consoles" (the actual language in both of those includes "a computer, mobile device, or any other general purpose computing [device".
(I've also rarely seen such a poorly-crafted set of definitions; the definitions in the law are in several places logically inconsistent with the provisions in which they are applied, and in other places circular on their own or by way of mutual reference to other terms defined in the law, such that you cannot actually identify what the definitions include without first starting with knowledge of what they include.)
Replies
In typical jury trials, the jury is instructed that any terms not defined in the relevant statutes are to have their common-sense, ordinary meanings as understood by the jury. The jury is usually also selected to be full of reasonable, moderate people, and folks who are overly pedantic usually get excused during voir dire.
Do you really think a pool of 12 people off the street is going to consider an embedded system, wi-fi router, or traffic light as an "operating system" under this law? Particularly since they don't even have accounts or users as a common-sense member of the public would understand them?
From the bill:
> "Covered application store” does not mean an online service or platform that distributes extensions, plug-ins, add-ons, or other software applications that run exclusively within a separate host application
There is a reasonable argument that a linux distribution is, itself, a host application. This is clearly an argument against their intention... but makes perfect sense to me. With this argument, the law does not apply to pretty much any environment where the applications are scheduled and run by a supervising process, at least by my reading.