alt Hacker NewsIn 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?
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The jury is selected randomly. They try to weed out obvious kooks, but there is no attempt to make it either reasonable or moderate.
The hope is that twelve of your peers will at least avoid being able to persecute you for political goals. I hope neither of us ever has to find out.
MOST cases don't make it to jury. They're more likely to be resolved via motions and countermotions and the decisions of a jduge.
To dumb down "operating system" for normies, they're probably going to say something along the lines of "the software that makes your computer work.. like Windows." If it stays at that level, we'll have a specific, discrete definition in play.
A broader, equally correct definition could be "the software that makes technology work.. there's an operating system on your computer, your cell phone, your Alexa, and even your car." Then yes, some people will think of their Ring doorbell, the cash register at the coffee shop, and other embedded systems, even if they've never heard the word "embedded."
The definition that shows up will depend entirely on a) the context of the case and b) the savviness of the attorneys involved.
Not a bet I want to take.
You'll be arrested for some weird law that doesn't make sense, but it's ok because a pool of 12 people off the street won't consider whatever random thing you did a real crime!
Not sure why you are appealing to the rule on terms that aren’t defined, since the actual question is whether or not thet consider the vendor of the software powering the device as an “operating system vendor” which is, in fact, defined in the law, and the answer there seems to be hinge on whether or not they think it is a general purpose compute device, which would seem almost certain to be no for a traffic light, and likely to be no (but more debatable and potentially variable from instance to instance) in the other cases you list.
> Particularly since they don't even have accounts or users as a common-sense member of the public would understand them?
Not sure what having accounts or users “as a common sense member if the public would understand them” is relevant to since, to the extent having a “user” is relevant in the law, it to is defined (albeit both counterintuitively and circularly) in the law, and having an “account” isn’t relevant to the law at all.