[Hermel]

A good legal system provides legal certainty. It has clean and concise laws that are straight-forward to apply. In case of uncertainty, the responsible authorities should provide guidance on what they believe is the right interpretation. None of this has happened in the case at hand. The applicable (?) laws are not clear and the responsible authorities refused to provide guidance. This is poison for innovation and entrepreneurship as it makes doing business in the US unnecessarily risky. Resolving these questions in court should only be the measure of last resort as this process is slow and costly.

[jacquesm]

There is a good reason that these things don't move on a dime: you need to get them right. And as the underlying tug-of-war between the two main agencies shows: it isn't always clear-cut or simple. Not everything can be solved by a pull request or an over-the-air update, legal systems evolve and this is by design not a fast process.

Effectively this means that technology will always be able to outrun legal systems, for a little while anyway and that no legal system is ever a perfect match for the society it models and governs. This is not normally considered a problem.

[Hermel]

No, a good legal system cannot be outrun by technology. A good legal system provides sound foundations based on principles. Fraud is fraud, regardless of whether it is committed offline or online. Just like source code, legal code can be more or less well-designed, and it can yield more or less desirable outcomes. And in this case, the outcome the US legal system produced was much worse than "not perfect". The law failed to provide legal certainty and the authorities failed to provide clarity as well. Let's hope the courts will do their job -- a process that unfortunately can take many years.