But the Gonzalez v Google case taking direct aim at section 230 was just such a horrible vehicle that there was no point in even tackling the question it was supposedly raising (and which everyone was ignoring in favor of attacking or defending 230 outright). Even counsel for plaintiff there admitted that there was no point deciding anything if they didn't also win in Twitter v Taamneh, and Twitter v Taamneh was a real stretch for plaintiffs.
I would not argue at all that is what they did. There are remarkably few statutes about fair use specifically and as a doctrine it is a loose patchwork of precedence and principles.
If legislatures were to pass actual legislation for them to interpret that would be a different thing.
Its worth noting that the reason the fair use statutory language is the way it is is that it was largely a codification of the thn-existing case law on Fair Use as a Constitutional (stemming from the First Amendment) limit on the copyright power.
> If legislatures were to pass actual legislation for them to interpret that would be a different thing.
Congress isn’t really interested in expanding Fair Use beyond the Constitutional minimum, though.
Some of the dissenting opinion in these cases seems to be partly on the grounds of this is Andy Warhol (or Roy Lichtenstein, etc.) we're talking about here so their work is obviously important and transformational--in a way that my applying some Photoshop filters clearly isn't.
However, the court essentially boxed itself into weighing in only one the meaning of factor one, so it tries to reach the decision by half-importing factor four (the degree to which it substitutes the original) into factor one analysis. Furthermore, it ties itself into a knot to argue why Andy Warhol's use in the original prints was transformative and overall fair use, but the use in the newspaper article wasn't transformative.
The dissent manages to be even worse by, as you point out, essentially arguing that everything Andy Warhol does deserves to be fair use because it's Andy Warhol. Oh, and taking as many potshots at the majority opinion as is possible. As bad as the majority opinion was, the dissent is even worse.
That's not how I read it. The gist I took was that Andy Warhol deserves fair use because the art establishment has consistently viewed his works, the Prince piece included, as revolutionary. And to state the bloody obvious, if his work was not transformative, it never would have been seen as revolutionary.
that is not at all obvious to me--what is revolutionary in Warhol is not the art but the way people see it, like found art. but if you "found" the art in someone else's comic, and aren't substantially changing the actual image--the actual appearance of the work, the only part that could reasonably be described as being ripped off from someone else... it can be revolutionary without having meaningfully transformed the original, just the way people see it.
disclaimer: I don't have a lot of time for that kind of art, which no doubt biases me.
I think it is quite optimistic, if not even downright naive to assume the text matters at all for such protagonists.
If they were concerned about such things they would hold themselves to higher ethical standards than other courts, not lower ones. If my countries supreme court behaved that way, I would expect weeks of protest till the court takes care of that.
I am not an US citizen, but the looking at the way the SCOTUS has both been conducting itself I am very worried about the state of democracy in the US. To someone outside the US it is already stunning that you can elect governments or political leaders that have the minority of the vote, but them then filling three live time supreme court positions?
Who thought that was a good system? They must have smoked the bad stuff.
> The author appears to have an implicit bias against the US Supreme Court, its ethical standards, and the overall American democratic system, particularly in terms of the process for electing government officials and lifetime Supreme Court justices.
That seems pretty good. I should turn this into a browser widget.
Calling this a "bias" isn't the flex you think it is and probably tells more about your own world view than about mine.
As an admitted non-American, writing forcefully about a branch of our government that you don't understand, and essentially advocating for dramatic changes to our constitution to reign in this branch of government that you don't understand but do not like, it is transparently obvious you have some bias such that even ChatGPT can detect and characterize it.
Why are you so hung up about the word 'bias'? Just own it. Americans almost certainly criticize your country and its government.
For all it's faults, I would argue the Supreme Court has worked reasonably well - because the justices do not seek elections and do not owe loyalty to their appointees. And anything they do could be relatively easily undone if the US could ever be bother to pass laws again.
In a way, you can almost think of their decisions as open-source. All of their arguments are written down and you can actually read their reasoning for yourself (as opposed to some of the dire interpretations offered by journalists). There are some notable exceptions (Alito and Thomas), but for the most part you can read their arguments for yourself and see that most of them are pretty professional and fair-minded.
> I think it is quite optimistic, if not even downright naive to assume the text matters at all for such protagonists.
If anything, the newest court is doing the opposite of what you are worried about. They are willing to throw out established precedence where there is not written law. In a way, the new court is leaning more democractic to a fault.
The Legislature and Executive can pass a new law that overrides a decision that ruled on existing law.
This is pretty directly refuted by Dobbs. Roe v. Wade was not ambiguous and was a settled matter of constitutional law until the new court decided they didn't like it.
I don’t like the decision here as well for political reasons, but if you read the arguments the Supreme Court is just saying that abortion law is a state issue not a federal one. Which limits the power of the federal government. Which is good.
Looking at how Southern states seem to be competing to out-fascist each other right now, devolving everything to states' rights seems like a bad idea. If it were entirely left up to the states, half of them would be hunting gays for sport. Having common standards as a culture enshrined in law and a central government strong enough to protect and enforce those standards also seems good. It's weird that this isn't even up for debate where gun rights are concerned but bodily autonomy, rights to privacy and free speech are all up in the air.
I don't like the results of the Dobbs decision either. But the root cause of the problem was always legislative, not judicial. When the legislature fails to make the laws clear, anything that ends up in front of the Supreme Court is going to be a toss-up. Tell your members of Congress to do better.
One feature of the system, not a bug, is the protections against the majority riding roughshod over the minority.
> They must have smoked the bad stuff.
They did an incredibly good job. It's still the best Constitution.
I say this while still disagreeing with a lot of the decisions of the Supreme Court.
[citation needed]
Doesn't make it the "best" but on the other hand you can't achieve that kind of longevity by "smoking the bad stuff."
No it hasn't. The oldest written national constitution in continuous effect is that of San Marino, from 1600 (unless you count some charters that usually aren't treated that way, like Magna Carta). And plenty of nations survive just fine with traditional rather than integrated written constitutions, which are something of a modern fad, which is why none of the longest continuous constitutional systems have a written constitution in the first place.
Okay, oldest constitution for a country bigger than a football stadium.
Like I said, doesn't make it "best" but clearly has something going for it.
The claim that the US has the oldest constitution, even with the caveats necessary to exclude older written constitutions, is simply false; countries without single integrated written constitutions still have constitutions, and many of those are much older in continuous operation than the US constitution (or the US).
At the risk of sounding snarky, this line has become a major eye roller for me. Are there any democracies on Earth, by this definition?
People today think of the US as one "country" but when its Constitution was written it was much closer to the EU: an alliance and economic free trade and free movement area with basic shared rules.
The vote to create the United States was done by unanimity of Member States not by a popular vote.
Is the EU a "democracy"?
Even within states since people are concentrated in urban areas, it’s easy for the minority to engage in gerrymandering so that the rural population voting power is more than urban voters.
That’s not to mention the fact that even in conservative states, on singular issues like abortion, drug legalization and the right for felons to vote, the population runs to the left of the legislation. When those initiatives are put on the ballot, they win. So the legislators in those states are making it harder for initiatives to get on the ballots.
You can look at states like Texas that are taking more power out of the hands of the city.
https://thehill.com/homenews/state-watch/4007362-texas-passe...
"The United States shall guarantee to every State in this Union a Republican Form of Government, and shall protect each of them against Invasion; and on Application of the Legislature, or of the Executive (when the Legislature cannot be convened) against domestic Violence."
As mentioned, the definitions of republics and democracies have blurred over the years as people often use them interchangeably. Republics have representatives. Just as the ancient Roman Republic did, with its famous Senate. Pure democracies run on majority rule and direct voting on laws.
https://constitution.congress.gov/browse/essay/artIV-S4-1/AL...']
The Islamic Republic of Iran is a republic, not a denocracy.
The US is a republic that notionally is both democratic and federal.
> The Executive, Legislature, and Judicial branches form a triumvirate, which is a stable form of government.
No, they don't, because a tirumvirate consists of three people, and triumvirates are notoriously unstable. (The two ruling Roman triumvirates from which the term is generalized having lasted less than 15 years combined.)
It works for the US. Also the Soviet Union - the Party, the KGB, and the Army. The reason for stability is one can block the other two. The Constitution is full of checks and balances to this end.
No, it doesn’t, because, again, the US doesn’t have one.
Some people try to distinguish between representative democracy and direct democracy but since the latter is rare, democracy usually just means the former.
Edit: I guess republic is particular from of democracy, plus non-monarch.
Which forms? What transactions?
I'm sure you're referencing something real, but my search isn't turning up anything https://www.google.com/search?q=supreme+court+forms+transact...
It's so shitty that the court has so persistently been such IP maximalist, in so so many ways.
While Section 230 was asserted among the defenses in the case, the Supreme Court decision didn’t address it at all, instead finding the underlying claim failed as a matter of law, making Section 230 immunity irrelevant. The headline saying that it left 230 protections unchanged is technically true, in the same sense as one saying that it left, say, the scope of liability under the Espionage Act in place would be.
But its also misleading clickbait, for much the same reason as one saying that it left, say, the scope of liability under the Espionage Act in place would be.
It's true the finding wasn't "about" section 230, but to say the case wasn't about 230 is missing the point.
When YouTube says "You may like this terrorist recruitment video" that is undeniably their own speech and shouldn't fall under 230.
However... Isn't it a little bit of the same thing when a tech company says "This isn't a illegal in any way, but we're going to use our intentionally ambiguous TOS to remove it".
Aren't the things you say similar to the things you chose to prevent from being said?
Is a forum showing you the most upvoted (reddit's /top) or the most recently commented (phpBB), or some combination (HN and reddit's /hot) and saying "you may like {{most popular thing}}" the site's speech or the user's? Is it only the site's speech if the recommendation is personalized? Or if the recommendation is a single item, and not a list?
The court's 230 interpretation today[*] seems to be that suggesting or promoting user-content isn't itself site content, which is fairly in-line with the original intent of the law (that showing, and even ordering user-content isn't site-content).
[*]: Which as others mentioned, is totally independent of this ruling.