The Supreme Court’s tech illiteracy is becoming a big problem

The article meanders around and never really ties anything together. It probably doesn't deserve a serious criticism.

As a reader one of the first problems I had was that the criticism of Ebay as an invention is reasonable.

I also thought it was funny to bring up the ages of the various justices, point out that it didn't reflect their technological savvy and then move on to other things, never to come back again.

I also don't get the criticism of analogies to older technologies. When faced with applying a statute to new technologies, where the intended application to old technologies is clear but the application to a new one isn't, discussing which older technologies are relevant analogies is a useful way to proceed. In this case it's clear that Congress did not intend the Copyright Act to cover rental of home A/V equipment, but did intend it to cover the 1970s community-antenna systems. So it seems pretty natural to ask: is Aereo's service, in the relevant features, more like CATV or more like equipment rental? The court might've gotten the answer to that wrong, but it seems like the right question to ask. At least, absent Congress actually updating the law to clarify how they want it applied to new technologies. I've read through the opinion and I don't see anything technological to disagree with there. They correctly described how the system operates; the only real disagreement is over whether the Copyright Act was intended to cover a system operating in such a manner.

Now at oral argument they sometimes use pretty out-there analogies, but some of that is trying to probe the limits of what an attorney for one side or the other is arguing. By asking "isn't this like X?" they're often trying to get the lawyer to clarify precisely why it isn't.

>I thought their aereo interpretation was probably on the mark.

I don't think it was, but I certainly don't think it's because they're old and so stupid that they have to understand things by analogy rather than some sort of gnostic osmosis.

>But the inability to truly understand the impact of technology on the country and the globe by the highest court in the land - and further inability to understand that much of that impact exists without deep historical context and outside traditional court definitions - is worrying.

>To think that this group of technology-illiterate academics can hand down judgments that can drastically alter the legality of future innovations - without understanding the most basic parts of those innovations - should give everyone pause.

This is not the job of courts nor is it intended according to the US constitution. That job falls on the other two branches of the government i.e Congress that needs to make and update laws of the land and the executive which has some discretion on which are actually enforced etc.

The job of the courts is only to see what the written word of laws means and get inside the heads of the lawmakers wrote that law at the time to try to learn the intent behind the law and how it applies to the case at hand. Thus analogies are perfectly appropriate to pursue.

If Congress thinks that, for example, the Aereo decision was wrong and hurts innovation, they can pass legislation legalizing Aereo in probably just a week or two. It's not the court's job to decide that Aereo is good for innovation so it should be allowed to operate, even if it's illegal. It's the courts job to understand what Aereo is, and how the law and it's intent applies to it.

What particular innovation has been stifled for centuries due to a Supreme Court ruling?

If it's incredibly easy, surely it must have happened a number of times.

> "The only way to approach something new is though analogy, right? I can't think of any other way."

That's certainly true to an extent, but it also strikes me as the sort of thing you're a lot more likely to hear from a philosopher than a mathematician. Sure, you could try to understand computers by drawing analogies to televisions and typewriters and everything else that they can emulate, but that approach will always miss the rather fundamental concept of what it means for a machine to be a universal computer, capable of building complex processes out of a very small set of very simple operations. The analogies only serve as our inspiration for which algorithms to implement and what meaning to ascribe to the result of a computation that the machine was always capable of performing. You can gain useful knowledge about the capabilities of computers in a bottom-up fashion starting with a simple instruction set and building things, just like mathematicians can start with a set of axioms and explore their implications ad infinitum.

It's an interesting question about the interesting etymology of the word. It certainly doesn't show any kind of illiteracy. How could you even begin to view it that way? That' span absurd interpretation of the words.

It's an important source of educated debate about things currently going on in often very specialized tech news, often between domain experts. Isn't that why you're here?

The court is still very political. I can't even begin to talk about Monsanto--they are horrid. I remember having a botany professor at Sonoma State university who would literally shake when everever he started to talk about how evil Monsanto is--that was years ago.

My point is Not that the court has flaws. It does--that's why the appointment of Supreme Court Justices is so dam important. Enen then, I've noticed justices change their views through out the years--so I'm glad they are there for life. Would I like to see Ph.D's in only the hard sciences a basic minimum as a requirement in order to be Supreme Court justices--Yes!