A good friend of mine who's a well regarded lawyer stated "the author's grasp of law is actually worse than the SCOTUS lack of understanding of technology" He also mentioned this smacked a little of age bias and navel gazing. When you think if the issues the SCOTUS has to address (medical/financial etc) you realize they're never going to be specialists and never have.
Isn't that exactly the knee-jerk defensive reflex one would expect from a well regarded member of the establishment when their peers are under (admittedly overly histrionic) criticism?
I'm not defending the author or his position, but I don't find that dismissal very compelling either.
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 may not be a software developer, but as I read the invention [of eBay], it’s displaying pictures of your wares on a computer network and, you know, picking which ones you want and buying them.' [Chief Justice Roberts] next said about the multibillion-dollar Internet corporation: 'I might have been able to do that.'"
That statement is reasonable to this software developer.
edit:
"In a recent oral argument about a computer-implemented, electronic escrow service, Justice Kennedy asked whether 'a second-year college class in engineering” or 'any computer group of people sitting around a coffee shop in Silicon Valley” could write the code for it 'over a weekend.' The lawyer said yes, to the dismay of many in the industry."
I completely lack dismay. Couldn't any computer group of people sitting around a coffee shop in Silicon Valley write an electronic escrow application over the weekend?
Both of these quotes seem to come from a place of awe for computer science as if it is magic and only wizards can do it. "I might have been able to do it" is scoffed at because how could anyone say that! If you could do it you'd be a millionaire now! Only the guy saying it is the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court and that's a much bigger accomplishment than ebay. And all the justices are intellectual titans. Even the ones everyone hates.
Similarly the dismay of many in the industry thing. The author wants comp sci to be some kind of arcane lore that olds cant possibly understand because they're not hip enough. Tech stuff is also presented as kind of a black box that can't be compared to anything but itself, and if you aren't using silicon valley jargon 24/7 you just dont get it. The person who wrote the article in the OP is a tech cultist rather than a reasonable thinker.
Would you mind clarifying your intent? I can't tell if there is sarcasm there or not.
Your edit came after my other reply; I think it actually is the case that a group of computer people sitting in a coffee shop could sketch out an escrow system over the weekend. I guess they wouldn't want to run a business on it, but the shape of it could be there, no problem.
Sure, as long as it didn't have to have 99.99% uptime and scale to tens of thousands of simultaneous users.
But there are standard techniques for scaling and high availability. The patent simply covers the essence of the application itself. And I agree with you, demo-quality prototypes of auction and escrow apps are pretty easy to write.
It's emblematic of the style of the article. Roberts clearly isn't talking about building a huge corporation over a weekend, but that's the comparison that is made.
Similar to the complaint about Alito's comment about James Madison's views on video games. That clearly was a joke about Scalia's legal philosophy, not an actual misunderstanding about video games.
Plus didn't the courts just rule that taking an abstract idea, like an auction market, and adding "on the computer" (or presumaby "on the internet") doesnt make it patentable?
I would agree. criticizing the supreme court along these lines feels like like clickbait, and here i am commenting. at the risk of a thousand downvotes, I thought their aereo interpretation was probably on the mark.
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.
While I doubt that many 75-year-olds waste time at work perusing HN, the article misses, downplays or misunderstands several important points:
The justices' often use apparently clueless analogies to prompt the attorneys during oral arguments; these are suggestions that the argument needs to be clarified or reframed. Ultimatley, it's the attorneys job to make their cases, no matter how seemingly clueless the court might be.
Much/most of the real work at SCOTUS is done by clerks, some of sharpest young minds in the US. I'm betting they will peruse HN for background on issues.
It's incredibly easy to cherrypick from the vast library of court opinions for a few rotten tomatoes to throw at a straw man.
There is no straw man here. Yes, the article is poorly put together, starts with one thought and never finishes, etc.
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.
I'm sure their clerks are incredibly bright - but so are the lawyers standing before the Supreme Court - and if they can't explain the technology they're trying to defend to the justices, what makes you think a clerk can do better?
It's incredibly easy to stifle innovation and its potential offspring for centuries by not understanding it.
>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.
I had a relative that was a appeals court clerk, and I definitely got calls to explain computer concepts and answer questions. I answered with metaphors and references that she could follow up on.
The only way to approach something new is though analogy, right? I can't think of any other way.
> "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.
I would also point out that the justices could simply say something like, "Could you please provide a definition of the term 'troll' for the court?" This shouldn't be considered clueless because even if the justice does know the definition, it establishes a record of the terms as they're used in what follows.
I would hope that the reason we get these seemingly silly quotes is rather that the justices usually do this, and the occasional jokes result from boredom (even if they do show some misunderstanding).
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?
I wonder whether HN comes close enough to the effeciency of curated sources, conferences or some private circles to mention it as a proxy for staying on top of current developments, because the gems on HN are usually burried under a lot of comments and submissions without any societal significance. I can’t really form an opinion on that since I have never attended to technology assessment conferences and don’t read tech magazines.
If nothing else, I think it serves as a barometer for some sectors of tech's outlook on various visible events. As long as you keep in mind what sort of echo chamber/groupthink to look out for (a task when reading _any_ media) it's served well for me as a jumping off block for finding vectors to explore to better understand an issue.
>I wonder whether HN comes close enough to the effeciency of curated sources, conferences or some private circles to mention it as a proxy for staying on top of current developments.
When a development hits the media, there will be a thread on it at HN, and that thread will contain entire arguments and links to curated sources. The question is where to start to research if you're not an engineer. This is a better place than most.
As I said, I don't know whether they exist. HN might be the best source for the people, but the supreme curt might have access to more efficient sources.
This vastly overstates the wisdom of the justices. They're using clueless analogies most of the time because they're actually clueless, regardless of whether the arguments could be made better.
It's true that lawyers should explain their positions clearly in any court, but if the ultimate interpreter of fact can't even understand the facts they're being told, there's a fundamental problem.
I consider myself technologically literate, yet still everyday I ask questions and attempt to boil down complex ideas into understandable concepts. Sometimes for myself, sometimes for others around me.
I would be more concerned if the justices didn't ask the "dumb" questions or if they didn't try to comprehend using analogies, etc.
This is very important. I would be much more scared if the justices weren't asking massive numbers of "silly" questions. It would indicate that they thought they knew everything about the technology, which would be very disturbing.
Many of these questions are asked during oral arguments, where a lawyer is describing the technology with other analogies and comparisons to things that have precedent. The justice then ends up saying, "Well, following this line of reasoning, you're basically saying that Ebay's business model is an invention. Is it?" The lawyer then has to respond and clarify what he's saying.
The author pointed out a few dubious instances of tech illiteracy. The one about Ebay being an Invention. I
didn't think Ebay was an invention? I think what the
author doesn't take into account is the the Justices have
access to consultants, and staffers. The Supreme Court makes decisions in Bioscience; I think they can handle
stuff on technology? I wish all writers, speakers, and
Bloggers would stop using phrases like "pushback". I always
thought Patent Troll was a bad choice of words for describing a complex problem. The Supreme Court will always
be very political. The cases are not settled just on the
law, or facts. It scares me just how much power they have--especially when it goes against what I think is fair, or right.
> The Supreme Court makes decisions in Bioscience; I think they can handle stuff on technology?
Some of their decisions in biology are equally suspicious. For example, should genes, proteins, or DNA be patentable? That one has gone to the Supreme Court on occasion. But patenting human genetics can lead to crazy scenarios like "suddenly the entire human population in the United States is violating Monsanto's patent", which is patently absurd. Of course, I am purposefully exaggerating and twisting some of the arguments, but you can see how the courts can get biology just as wrong as any other technology.
On a related and amusing note: In March 2000, President Clinton announced that the genome sequence could not be patented, and should be made freely available to all researchers. The statement sent Celera's stock plummeting and dragged down the biotechnology-heavy Nasdaq. The biotechnology sector lost about $50 billion in market capitalization in two days. see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_Genome_Project
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!
They're actually not that political, usually. They're immune to politics so that protects them a great deal from the pressures that can be brought to bear on other branches of government.
They also have historically had a completely different axis on which their decisions turn. Not left or right, but strict or flexible in their relationship to the constitution. It leads to some real surprises and people often interpret these in terms of political pressures but really the supreme court is the one set of people in government who care the least about pleasing some political masters.
"The problem is that the justices were groomed in a field that emphasizes reasoning by analogy."
That doesn't excuse them form actually understanding the issues and terms at hand. Analogies are good for a lot of things, but they're awful for many others, including most technologies. Instead of using an analogy to understand the cloud, they could use a definition: "other people's servers." It seems to me that this is indeed a failing on the justices' part to put in effort to understand technologies that they rule on time and time again. This is no surprise as they constantly ignore scientific evidence in their rulings.
This isn't stupidity, it's and abdication of their duty. Either way, both things lead to horrible rulings like the Aereo one.
This society is gradually, transparently bending to the will of those in position of high influence. It appears the public does (a) not seem to care or (b) lacks knowledge of the happenings since the government info spill. I wonder how long it'll take to transform into Continuum (series).
