Complexity of legal problems [LWN.net]

Complexity of legal problems

Posted Feb 6, 2025 10:59 UTC (Thu) by farnz (subscriber, #17727)
In reply to: Complexity of legal problems by linuxrocks123
Parent article: The Linux Foundation on global regulations and sanctions

No, because my understanding of it is based on talking to a US lawyer (I'm not in the US, but I've been employed by US companies), who gave me the explanation about sanctions. Fundamental to it is that in as far as is possible in US law, sanctions are transitive; if entity A is sanctioned, and you know that entity B deals with entity A, then entity B is also sanctioned. And note that it's not about re-exporting per-se; it's about allowing entity A to bypass sanctions by using entity B as a cut-out.

If you need the details, I suggest you talk to your US sanctions lawyer.

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Complexity of legal problems

Posted Feb 6, 2025 11:34 UTC (Thu) by paulj (subscriber, #341) [Link] (2 responses)

The US' claim to universal jurisdiction, these transitive properties, and the effective (if not actual (?)) strict liability approach they take, combined with the huge grey areas left around stuff like "Can I collaborate with people I don't know 100% on patches for open-source? Can even talk to random people online?", along with current trends (not least, being intimately involved in the execution of genocide) make me think the only sensible and moral position for everyone in the rest of the world to be to "sanction" the USA and bar all interaction (inc trade) with the USA.

Complexity of legal problems

Posted Feb 6, 2025 14:34 UTC (Thu) by farnz (subscriber, #17727) [Link] (1 responses)

These transitive properties for sanctions aren't unusual globally - I know that Russian, UK, EU and Chinese rules on sanctions all have similar transitive properties and rules around liability for breaching sanctions that lead to the same huge grey areas (joys of working at more than one multinational where this stuff matters).

The only way to be safe is to limit your interactions to people you believe are in the same general jurisdiction as you, and to have citizenship or local equivalent in that jurisdiction - Indian citizens only associating with other Indian citizens, EU citizens with other EU citizens, Russians with Russians, UK citizens with UK citizens, Canadian citizens with other Canadian citizens etc. Otherwise, there's a risk that you'll hit one of the many edge cases, and get in trouble for doing something that you thought was perfectly legal, but isn't because you're hitting on your local jurisdiction's rules about international interactions.

Complexity of legal problems

Posted Feb 6, 2025 15:38 UTC (Thu) by paulj (subscriber, #341) [Link]

The other alternative, in this mad world where you may find some country somewhere decides you've broken their rules and deams you a criminal because you.... worked on writing Free Software (perhaps in collaboration with others) and you fell afoul of illiberal laws (be they ones which deem certain software illegal or ones which deem certain people as beyond the pale), is to do such work entirely anonymously. It takes care and dedication to do this, but it is possible.

There are already a good number of contributors to various projects who keep themselves anonymous. I expect we'll see this continue. Young people today seem much more conscious of online privacy and keeping a wall between their online and offline identities, than my generation - so this may come naturally.

There are also spheres of Free Software where the nature of the software strongly leads contributors to elect to be anonymous, because the nature of the software offends 1 or more governments around the world. Often, that nature being that the software gives users privacy from the government, e.g. in their communications, their data, or their financial interactions.

Governments really hate privacy. Maybe we should exercise it more.