alt Hacker NewsIt's a human level distinction that doesn't have technical distinction—the law handles these kinds of things just fine. The flesh doesn't know the difference between manslaughter and murder but we humans can figure it out well enough.
The world you envision where we decide that the law can't assess intent is certainly an interesting one but I don't think it would be the most functional.
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me-vs-cat • today at 2:20 AM
By "figure it out well enough" do you mean a laborious and expensive process fraught with miscarriages of justice despite good faith, best efforts? A process where being acquitted (or a plea deal to a lesser charge) might very well result in financial ruin?
Equating "acceptable browser vs abusive bot" with "manslaughter vs murder" is not useful.
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> the law handles these kinds of things just fine
No, people just like to claim that it does. Meanwhile legal departments are risk averse, so if nobody can articulate where the line is, you're banning all of the things you claim you're not banning. Even if a judge might ultimately come to a reasonable decision, do you want to be the one who pays the legal fees to "win" that case?
> The flesh doesn't know the difference between manslaughter and murder but we humans can figure it out well enough.
The reason things like this aren't a practical problem is that normal people can avoid needing to care about the distinction by endeavoring to not kill anyone to begin with. On top of that, the law actually does have some pretty specific rules about the distinction between manslaughter and murder.
Whereas the trouble here is that we need to distinguish between things that we specifically don't want to deter and something else which is proposed to be prohibited. The type of law that handles that kind of distinction most frequently is the tax code. The consequence is that it has to be made very specific or the result is a train wreck.