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Although these issues are very important, something feels wrong about having the Supreme Court justices (avg. age ~70) rule on tech matters like this. We need

• wyager 12y ago
  >Or perhaps a trial by jury where the selection criteria is employment in the relevant discipline for at least 10 years (academia or corporate). This could be egregiously abused without too much cleverness. "Oh, you're self employed in software? No jury duty for you." "Oh, you don't work for GE, the only company approved by the 'What Counts As Corporate Software' board? No jury duty for you." One must be very careful advocating for the creation of special courts. History is rife with examples of these being particularly corrupt and deplorable.
  • DevX101 12y ago
    You might be right. But our current system is already egregiously abused with minimal cleverness. One can predict with high accuracy a SC Justice's vote on most cases based on the political party of the president who appointed him/her.
    • rpedela 12y ago
      Overall it seems to self-correct which sometimes takes decades. While flawed, it is pretty good.
    • dragonwriter 12y ago
      > One can predict with high accuracy a SC Justice's vote on most cases based on the political party of the president who appointed him/her. Having taken a number of law and judicial politics courses, I can say this has been studied and its not at all true. You can tell with some accuracy a SC Justice's vote on issues that had high political salience at the time the individual justice was appointed by the position of the appointing administration on those issues, but predicting votes by party identification fails rather drastically for most other issues. There's a few evergreen issues that have had both high political salience and fairly consistent partisan breakdown of positions over a long time (e.g., abortion, gun control), and so these issues tend to be pretty consistently predictable by party ID. OTOH, most issues aren't like that (though issues that get lots of mainstream news coverage are disproportionately likely to be -- though even there many aren't), and issues like the particular one here (whether APIs are within the scope of copyright) haven't ever had high political salience.
      • danielweber 12y ago
        Yeah, that comment was silly. SCOTUS decides ~100 cases a year, and less than 10 are 5-4 decisions. Even even some of the 5-4 votes aren't split along ideological lines. Sometimes you can predict how a given Justice will act, based on how he feels about the specifics of similar cases.
  • indymike 12y ago
    The entire US system is predicated on regular citizens making the most important decisions to protect against unjust and corrupt decisions made by experts (judges). You example is EXACTLY the problem with the idea of special courts or special juries.
• Joeri 12y ago
  The problem is not with the legal system, it's with the lawmaking system. Bad laws produce bad lawsuits which produce bad rulings. The fundamental problem here is IP legislation, and how poorly it was written. Or maybe the problem is one level deeper, and it's actually with the electoral system and how it selects for inadequate lawmakers.
• woofyman 12y ago
  Why is the average age of the Supreme Court justices relevant ?
  • waterlesscloud 12y ago
    How could a group with exceptionally sharp minds who have lived through 7 decades of intense technological and social change possibly have better perspectives than people who have lived through 2?
    • baldfat 12y ago
      They all are EXTREMELY intelligent people! BUT the issues presented can be lost and then we are dependent on the staff of the justices who explain issues and then the bias of the people "educating" the justices have a HUGE influence on the justices.
      • musername 12y ago
        Is it not the staff, but expert-witnesses? Of course the influence of the technical advisory is subjective, so is the judge's. Arguably, more subjectivity levels out the preciseness of the judgement, it's a compromise, but certainly not unwelcome, when jury is invited to weigh out bias with it's own necessarily biased opinion. You can't get that out of the equation, because ...
  • jofer 12y ago
    I agree, the ageism implied by the OP is rather disappointing. I'm relatively young (mid-30's), but the persistent implications that anyone over 40 is technical inept is rather infuriating. Supreme court justices are (hopefully) legal experts, not technical experts. Having younger supreme court justices doesn't change that _at all_. I don't know of many lawyers that know what an API is.
  • bstrand 12y ago
    Good question. It probably is not relevant. I presume it's predicated on the notion that olds are generally less tech savvy (and therefore less capable of fairly & reasonably adjudicating technology cases.) Sarah Jeong has written thoughtfully on whether justices need be tech savvy: http://sarahjeong.net/2014/04/23/scotus-is-bad-at-computers-part-2/ http://sarahjeong.net/2014/04/23/scotus-is-bad-at-computers-...
• pla3rhat3r 12y ago
  It just means the people arguing this case need to explain the technology in a way they can understand it. Age has nothing to do with this.
• kybernetyk 12y ago
  > avg. age ~70 Why is that a problem? It's certainly possible that the judge was an avid home computer enthusiast in the 1980s and knows about tech. Old age doesn't automatically mean technological incompetence anymore.
  • pdabbadabba 12y ago
    Yes, and remember that each justice has an office full of clerks who will typically be in their late 20s and early 30s advising them.
    • woofyman 12y ago
      <sarcasm> Very handy to have if they have to tweet or something </sarcasm>
    • stonogo 12y ago
      The problem is the reprehensible ageism inherent in claiming older people are not capable of understanding technology. The same ageism you are implicitly supporting by "reassuring" us that young people (hence, magically tech-savvy people) will have input.
      • pdabbadabba 12y ago
        A bit shrill, I think. I don't think it's ageist to acknowledge that a lot of technologies didn't exist when older people were born and, thus, they are less likely to be familiar with them. That doesn't make them dumb, it's just an accident of history. And certainly I think that a good lawyer (and amici) should be able to explain anything the justices need to know -- the justices, whatever else you may think about them, are very intelligent people and surely capable of understanding just about anything, given sufficient time, regardless of their age. (Though this time caveat is a significant consideration. Overcoming that restriction is largely what clerks are for.) None of this is inconsistent, though, with it's being beneficial that there are additional very smart younger people, who may be more likely to be familiar with newer technologies just in case their perspective becomes relevant.
  • 12y ago
• dragonwriter 12y ago
  > Although these issues are very important, something feels wrong about having the Supreme Court justices (avg. age ~70) rule on tech matters like this. Its not a tech matter, its a matter of the application of Copyright law. Its exactly what the Supreme Court exists to do. > We need a new legal system for arbitrating disputes in technical disciplines overseen by a panel of technical experts. Specialized trial or intermediate appellate courts of this type may make some sense (though such a specialized body --whose members are no doubt both drawn from and likely to leave to industry -- runs a particular risk of regulatory capture and becoming a body that reflects very well the interests of the bigger players in the industry), but I don't see any good reason for fragmentation at the top of the judicial branch just because technology, so I don't see any reason that ultimately such issues wouldn't end up with the Supreme Court. > Or perhaps a trial by jury where the selection criteria is employment in the relevant discipline for at least 10 years (academia or corporate). Specialized juries defeat the purpose of trial by jury -- and, anyway, then you just create a bunch of additional litigation over the boundaries of the "relevant discipline" for each case as each side tries to set the experience qualifications to suit the pool of jurors it thinks will be most favorable.
• rayiner 12y ago
  I disagree. This is not a case where you're digging around in the weeds trying to figure out which function does what. You don't need to be a computer scientist to understand the legally-relevant concepts in a case like this. Especially at the appellate level, where you're working with high-level concepts, and where you have people with the relevant technological background submitting amicus briefs explaining the concepts. I don't think anyone on the panel read the amicus briefs in this case and simply failed to understand what an API is.[1] The real issue in this case is that a judge, applying the copyright law, simply does not care about whether finding API's to be copyrightable hinders interoperability or cloning of software. It's simply not legally relevant. The lynchpin of copyright is originality and creativity. Are the Java API's original and creative? That's the only relevant question.[2] [1] And I would posit that software is easier to understand for a lay-person than a complex reinsurance arrangement or financial instrument. How would Hacker News react to the proposition that we should have specialized courts to decide financial disputes, with judges required to have a minimum of 10 years experience in Wall Street? [2] Having written internal API's for software products, I would say they definitely are! API design is hard work that requires a lot of careful thought. Making a beautiful API is as much a creative expression as writing a sonnet or a short story, and is no less deserving of copyright protection.
  • nitrogen 12y ago
    simply does not care about whether finding API's to be copyrightable hinders interoperability or cloning of software. That is exactly why a legal professional is the wrong person to decide the issue. I've written plenty of APIs myself, and when it comes to interoperability, anybody should be free to reimplement the same interfaces, no matter how creative my design. Anything else would destroy competition in the software industry and promote a virtual dystopia of vendor lock-in.
    • rayiner 12y ago
      > [A]nybody should be free to reimplement the same interfaces, no matter how creative my design. Anything else would destroy competition in the software industry and promote a virtual dystopia of vendor lock-in. But that isn't a technical argument. If it had some empirical support it might be an economic one, but it's mostly just an ideological argument. One that, I might add, many software engineers would disagree with.
• indymike 12y ago
  Actually, this is perfect for the Supreme Court because a court set precedent aside with a rather novel decision. The issue is not a matter of technology, it's a matter of law. I think the court knows what it is doing.
• gioele 12y ago
  > We need a new legal system for arbitrating disputes in technical disciplines overseen by a panel of technical experts. The good thing about non-technical courts is that they force the parties to explain what is at stake in terms that every intelligent person can understand. This process is very important because it can highlight things that are often assumed by people in the trade. It is the law equivalent of "rubber duck" debugging.
• kchoudhu 12y ago
  People from their generation got us to the moon and birthed the internet. What have we done recently?
• WildUtah 12y ago
  You don't want a special purpose court with supposed experts running anything. We have a special purpose patent court with technically experienced experts and they're the ones with the agenda to destroy the startup and independent software ecosystem by expanding patents to cover every aspect of software.[0] [0]arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2012/09/how-a-rogue-appeals-court-wrecked-the-patent-system/
• musesum 12y ago
  Seems like a tradeoff between fluid intelligence and pattern recognition. In my 20's it was easier to pick up new concepts, with longer short term memory. In my 50's, I have acquired more patterns to apply. The downside, when I was younger, was going down blind alleys that wound up as a dead ends. The downside, when I got older, is misapplying an old pattern instead of synthesizing a new one. That's why I liked working with older people, in my 20's, and now working with younger people. To balance both tradeoffs. The Supreme Court spends much of its time interpreting the patterns that are laid out in the constitution and laws passed by congress. Sometimes it synthesizes a new pattern, which will be interpreted for the next 10's or 100's of years. For copyright, there is some value in recalling patterns from the last few decades. For example, the film industry thought that TV and later VHS would kill their business. Another is when the music industry thought that radio, cassette tapes, and MP3 files would kill their business. The problem of employing experts as the final judge is their bias towards a particular pattern. The time spent going deep in a particular field would mean that they have less time to go broad across all fields. IMO, how to benefit US commerce is about as broad as it gets.
• musername 12y ago
  The expert-witnesses are ment to explain the problems in laymen-terms, while the court is to precide over the judicial implications given by the law that are a supposed as a level baseline. If the expert would be judge directly, he'd need expertize in law or possibly require judicial expert-witness. The Jury is supposed to level bias. Industry experts in politics is more sensical, as legislature is where by definition speciallized law is written. They are littered with economic opinions, not to say business sock puppets, already, while judges are merely incompetent on technical matters atop being burdened with - let's say - type-unsafe law code. This happens already of course, but there's little opportunity for activist, apparently.
• rodgerd 12y ago
  A general purpose court with a 70 year old judge ruled against Oracle after the judge learned Java programming to understand the arguments better. A specialised court notorious for blindly enforcing tighter interpretations of IP laws reversed the decision. You might want to try drawing your examples from reality, not prejudice.