"It probably does not apply to you" and "Laws are usually applied as intended" and "You'll probably be ok" is what i keep hearing.
None of that addresses "if you get unlucky and some prosecutor decides to help his career by prosecuting you as an enabler-of-child-inappropriate-whatever-it-is". YOLOing away one's freedom on "probably" seems risky, and there is no reward to be had for doing it.
The only sane solution is to simply add "not for use in california" to all OSs, until California gets its collective head out of its collective rectum.
Four of the biggest OSes (iOS, macOS, Android, and Chrome OS) are made in California by the companies who pushed this legislation through. Never going to happen.
>simply add "not for use in california" to all OSs
I was wondering if a boilerplate like that would be legally binding if the language were more generic. eg- "This software may not be used by any individual or in any locality where it is not legal to do so".
Another service precluded "persons under the age of 18", but if the language of the law doesn't align with that (considering emancipated persons under the age of 18, or people over the age of 18 under some form of guardianship), would a California carve out still be required for compliance?
And the state AG can only bring a civil case, with fines limited in proportion to the number of actual children affected by the non-compliance.
And for most applications, compliance is as simple as calling the relevant API and throwing away the return value, because most applications aren't doing anything that is already required by law to have age restrictions.
and you are 100% sure none of this will change suddenly, and are willing to bet you have the money to defend yourself in case you are sued wrongly, perhaps, but still need to provide a lawyer to defend yourself, on your own dime? ballsy move.
> and you are 100% sure none of this will change suddenly
Yeah. We're talking about a law that's still over a year from taking effect. It's not going to be replaced by one having the opposite effects overnight with no warning.
> and are willing to bet you have the money to defend yourself in case you are sued wrongly
Since I don't develop or distribute applications or operating systems that are used by children, let alone software that would be legally required to behave differently when the user is a child, I'm quite confident that any lawsuit targeted at me by the State of California's elected AG would be laughed out of court at the first hearing, and I'd probably have plenty of offers of pro-bono representation. And I wouldn't even need a lawyer to help me ask to see the evidence that a child was affected by the non-compliance of the software I didn't write, and if a court did somehow get convinced, I could survive being fined the maximum fine for negligent violations with respect to at least several children. And I'm not at all concerned about receiving an injunction to not do something I'm already not doing.
Any law could be amended, or abused. Not having a law can make prosecutorial misconduct easier. I don't see anything in this law that seems more ripe for creative misinterpretation and abuse than is typical, and I don't think it likely that a California state court would cooperate with an egregious attempt to abuse this law.
You seem to be having a reaction to this law that would be triggered by being confronted with any law that isn't specified with the precise mathematical rigor necessary to appease a compiler.
None of that addresses "if you get unlucky and some prosecutor decides to help his career by prosecuting you as an enabler-of-child-inappropriate-whatever-it-is". YOLOing away one's freedom on "probably" seems risky, and there is no reward to be had for doing it.
The only sane solution is to simply add "not for use in california" to all OSs, until California gets its collective head out of its collective rectum.