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Trying tot redefine reinstall?

Trying tot redefine reinstall?

Posted Dec 27, 2025 18:52 UTC (Sat) by Heretic_Blacksheep (guest, #169992)
In reply to: Trying tot redefine reinstall? by nevets
Parent article: A partial ruling in the Vizio GPL suit

The law runs on definitions. Lay people may dismiss this as semantics, but it's a fundamental of the practice of US law to say what you mean and mean what you say - exactly as stated and no more. That's why most of the better written statutes on the books define core terms to prevent people from shifting a law's meaning into something that fits an agenda that doesn't align with the law's intent as apparently one party tried to do in this case.

When a judge is in doubt because of ambiguity in the law, they usually fall back on how a term is likely understood by the general laity (hence the ruling). Another example of meeting necessary definitions would be all the federal lawsuits that additionally allege RICO violations - and the resultant ire of a federal judge because "the RICO" has a very specific construction and intent that almost no federal lawsuits alleging RICO meet. RICO (Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act) is narrowly tailored to meet the federal government's need to take down organized crime syndicates, namely the "Five Families of New York" in the 1970s but also others since then. It's become a punctuation mark in federal lawsuits trying to win public opinion aspects as a "we think these are really bad people!!!111" mark instead where lawyers have been ignoring the definitions of the statute to try to make spectacle.


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Trying tot redefine reinstall?

Posted Jan 8, 2026 8:58 UTC (Thu) by Wol (subscriber, #4433) [Link]

And in the UK, sometimes the law runs on Hansard ... :-)

Definitions are very important, but we've had a couple of cases where one side said "the law says ..." (and they were right), and the judges responded "But Hansard says" (the MPs were lied to), and they were, so the judges ruled "the law is invalid, passed by deception".

Cheers,
Wol


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