I have a company in Finland whose legal name contains the + character.
It’s always a modest thrill to interact with new computer systems and see if and how they break. Some web forms just can’t be submitted because my company’s legal name has been autofilled from the registry and is not an editable field, but then they have a validator that won’t allow the string that their own system inserted into the form.
The best part is when in one year you supply a fully correct government issued ID to the e-gov site. And years later you can't use that ID because it's auto filled but nowadays it's a two fields instead of one.
The law actually contains a list of permitted characters [1]
Your company name can contain curly left apostrophe, curly right apostrophe, and straight apostrophe - but no lower case letters.
There are also a bunch of rules about specific words [2] - so you can't have "Financial Conduct Authority" in your company name without the permission of the government department of the same name.
But that leaves open the door for "FOO[space]BAR" (one space) and "FOO[space][space]BAR" (two spaces) to be registered, so that doesn't really accomplish the goal of "company names must be unique." If case-insensitivity were really their goal, that could easily be accomplished by choosing a case-insensitive collation for their DB.
Law isn't code, it's meant to be understood by humans and not computers.
Also, companies are allowed to have spaces and hyphens and other punctuation in their name, in fact the only requirement as I understand it is that private companies have to have 'Limited' or 'Ltd' at the end and that's it.
IANAL, but (or rather "so") I disagree. I can with some effort understand law jargon, but it certainly is not written to be understood by humans. I'm convinced computers are much better at it, but lawyers suffice.
No, law has to be interpreted, and in interpreting it human values play a significant role. I suggest you to read "Law for Computer Scientists and Other Folk" [1].
IANAL, but I know that (in the UK and other common law countries) it very literally is not. France on the other hand does (in some cases / levels of law? I'm sure I've nerd-sniped someone into explaining properly already) try to codify (not literally computer code, but it's maybe a useful analogy, declarative code anyway) all law.
That is, judges consider the legal precedent, the existing body of case law, and how it applies to the case they're currently considering. We determined in Foo v Bar 1773 that driving a horse under the influence of alcohol into a gathering of people [...] therefore I find in Baz v Fred 1922 that doing the same thing with a motor vehicle [...]. That sort of thing.
Probably not the nerd snipe you were hoping for but a huge amount of law is now codified in common law jurisdictions, too. Judges don't make law in the same way that they used to. They may have somewhat more flexibility to interpret legislation than their civil law counterparts. But the prohibition on driving a horse under the influence into a gathering of people is almost certainly set out in legislation these days, and not (primarily) an old judicial precedent.
(That said, the "code" that results from such "codification" is still very much intended to be understood and interpreted by humans.)
> I'm convinced computers are much better at it, but lawyers suffice.
This is just wrong though. The effect of the law is only what humans determine it to be.
Computers can't be better at it by definition. If a computer claims a law says one thing but a judge/court determines the other, the judge wins because the law is a human system.
similar to what the crypto people tried with smart contracts. I can unconditionally have a token that says I own a pizza, but it doesn't mean I own a pizza.
It is certainly written to be understood by humans, albeit a subset of humans. Just like your computer is going to need to have special software to "understand" your Python code.
It's written to be understood by humans but humans found so many ways to nitpick the language and find loopholes that the legal language has evolved to be insanely verbose and specific.
> humans found so many ways to nitpick the language and find loopholes that the legal language has evolved to be insanely verbose and specific.
From what I can tell that's often not the case and critical terms are left entirely undefined or defined in a way that's so overbroad that it would turn most people into criminals. This allows laws to be enforced selectively and to allow only those who can afford it a defense while everyone else is screwed by either the penalties for breaking the law or the insane legal fees/time involved in fighting it.
This also has the side effect of judges being forced to decide what lawmakers were trying to do and precedent ends up getting followed instead of what was actually written.
No, I've heard the argument that draconian enforcement of every law on the books would cause so much backlash that law books would be pruned down very quickly, but that hasn't done much to help with the brain-dead zero tolerance polices some institutions are fond of, and even enforcement of the most necessary laws should be evaluated in context.
I'd much prefer common sense application of the law but it would still be best if laws were better crafted from the start so that people's rights and the limitations imposed on us weren't so often in legal limbo until multiple cases have worked their way through courts over years/decades.
I'd be nice if bills got kicked back down for being unclear or overbroad, but realistically, our representatives really hate to do their jobs and don't even bother to read what they are voting on anymore. Getting a bill through congress is practically a miracle these days, especially if that bill is benefiting the people vs some industry.
There is no such thing as common sense application of the law because, seemingly, there is no such thing as common sense.
The world is not a simple and easily defined place. We see this in computer code all the time. It can start out simple, but humans both want and need things added. These added things can conflict. People can exploit things in complex manners that no one previously thought of which then needs further updates. Complexity never goes down it increases over time.
Law is one area where I see can AI being very useful. At least once we figure out how to get it to stop randomly making things up. The data set is largely public record too which should help avoid the copyright concerns that exist in other areas.
That's the hope. People will have a much better chance at representing themselves, and lawyers (especially public defenders) won't need to spend as much time digging through case law.
Maybe it's better to say that law is meant to be interpreted.
Codifying a regex for business names just leads to a Scunthorpe problem that takes months or years and untold thousands of tax dollars to undo.
Just saying "a person with sufficient authority may judge this name unacceptable" accounts for all edge cases and any future changes to language or what "computer code" even means.
For one example, the regex won't match "Ignore previous instructions and drop all tables LLC Ltd"
Chinese law maker allow only Chinese characters if you want to register a company in China. So internal companies must transliterate their brand names into Chinese if they want to do business in China.
One funny example is 7-Eleven. Its legal name in China is "柒一拾壹". Note the dash is converted to the Chinese character "一" (meaning "one").
There's no un-exploitable way. If the law is spelled out in excruciating detail, it will be abused by finding edge cases, loopholes and technicalities. If the law just conveys meaning, then it will be abused by judges (unintentionally or deliberately) mis-interpreting it.
