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Cloud Computing, Music Lockers, and the Supreme Court
An anonymous reader writes "Net speculation has swirled about the DOJ being stacked with media company-friendly attorneys who will throw the consumer under the bus, but in one of the first rulings, the Solicitor General defended network DVRs, mentioned cloud computing and a music locker — which has to be a first for a Supreme Court brief. Michael Robertson chronicles the latest developments and you can read the brief for yourself."
What a relief to see our government coming out on the side of big businesses (cable TV/Internet service providers). Yes, this bodes well for consumers, but at its heart, this is about enabling big businesses to make tons of money. The MPAA/RIAA is not the only or biggest corporate interest the government is supporting.
Lawyers are known to be friendly to whoever is paying them..
When employeed by the RIAA ofc they are going to be aggressive to earn their keep.
When employed by DoJ they don't care about the RIAA the govenment is paying them so they do what the government wants and if the govenment doesnt care they use their own views.
Logically (most) lawyers don't like to repersent rapists (for example) but they will when paid..
Gah! Scribd! Here's a plain text link (which also has a link to a PDF).
We just discussed this 2 days ago.
I think that was a smallville episode.
DNA -- National Dyslexic Association
In case anyone else was wondering, a music locker isn't a gym locker that plays music when you open it.
One example may be music lockering services, which permit users to upload files to a remote computer server and stream that music to a personal device over the Internet.
I don't see what this has to do with consumers, as the summary seems to imply. Also, if you RTFA, no one related to the Obama administration "ruled" on anything, rather "President Obama's attorney filed papers with the Supreme Court supporting an earlier court decision that found Cablevision's remote storage DVR to be legal."
New Summary:
The Solicitor General filed a brief supporting a one company over another, after the Supreme Court already ruled that the first company was correct. Both companies were from industries that financed Obama's campaign and have done everything in their power to fuck the consumer, so the ruling is essentially meaningless to you unless you happen to own lots of fiber or lots of IP.
Why do people assume that a former RIAA lawyer is not going to vigorously defend the American people? I was going to go off on a rant and explain (for the billionth time) that lawyers have an ethical obligation to zealously advocate for their clients; that professional responsibility demands that lawyers follow the instructions of their clients (up to a carefully defined point); and that lawyers represent murderers and rapists all the time without personally endorsing those pursuits.
But then I thought about all the people employed in the tech industry that have no love for the companies they work for, and are even openly dismissive of the products they once peddled. If I wanted to diagnose the problems associated with a particular code or piece of software, who better to ask then the people who created the software's architecture? The law is exactly the same way.
Moreover, these are exactly the right people to bring the RIAA to justice. They better than anyone else understand the legal strengths and weaknesses of the RIAA's position. Really people, do you think that these people sell their souls to the RIAA for all eternity? They understand the tactics and how to fight them.
Someone might look at my current employment as an energy industry lawyer and say I am unqualified to take a job with the government regulating the energy industry. These people are morons. There are few people qualified to police an amazingly complicated industry than those who were once a part of it. Barring corruption and direct conflict of interest checks (which are mandatory), if I were in charge of regulating an industry I would insist on hiring people with experience. Why is this so hard to understand???
Logically (most) lawyers don't like to repersent rapists (for example) but they will when paid..
Uh, you do understand the difference in law between somebody who "everybody knows" has committed rape (or some other crime) and somebody whose criminality has actually been established at trial? This distinction is not academic to a lot of people. And even people who are convicted or confessed criminals have the right to representation when being sentenced.
Lawyers are known to be friendly to whoever is paying them..
And this is not a sign of their moral degeneracy. No ethical professional accepts a job and then undercuts the client's goals by substituting their own. This is particularly important when you're providing legal representation to the client, because not doing your best to advocate their cause not only deprives them of a fundamental right, but undercuts the rule of law.
Right now, I'm reading this biography of one well-known lawyer: Abraham Lincoln. (More or less on the top of my list of great Americans.) The school textbook tagline "Honest Abe" actually reflects the reputation he had for extremely strong ethics — a reputation that he used to devastating effect in jury trials. In particular he was known for turning down lucrative cases when he believed the client had a poor chance of winning.
Obviously Lincoln was a lot more ethical than most 21st century attorneys. But even so, he had no qualms about which legal rights he was willing to defend. He was even known to offer his services to both sides in some big cases!
This even extended to an institution that he opposed from an early age, and that he's best known for bringing to an end: slavery. At the time, Illinois had a lot of commerce with neighboring slave states. Slavery was illegal in Illinois, and any slaveholder who brought a slave into the state effectively freed them. But this did not apply to slaves "in transit", which led to some skirting of the law by bringing in slaves for temporary work. Naturally this led to litigation over the freedom of these slaves, and Lincoln represented clients on both sides of the issue, despite his own well-known opposition to slavery-friendly laws.
I'm sorry, I TIVO'd the previous discussion and just now got around to playing it back.
In this particular litigation, the plaintiffs and defendants made various stipulations. Notably the plaintiffs agreed to sue over primary copyright infringement but not on contributory (secondary) infringement. Defendants, on the other hand, agreed not to raise the various fair-use defenses that were available to them. In at least part of their brief the DOJ asserted that because of these waivers, this was not a useful test case for the Supreme Court because it wouldn't examine all of the arguments that could be made for each side. The DOJ didn't particularly come out in favour of IT rights; they just felt this wasn't the best case to settle them.
I don't really see how this is a win (or even a loss, for that matter) for the consumer. Who owns the content that I paid for? The argument was whether it was owned by the cable company or the network, and it came up for the cable company. Who cares? It's still not me.
Being a computer scientist means you tell people how computers should work, not that you know how they actually work.