There actually are countries where rentals as such don't exist, but where they have contracts "for purchase with sell-back rights" -- which amounts to a rental. Basically, one buys at 1000 (arbitrary currency unit), with a contractual right to sell back to the original seller at 980 after a week, 960 after two weeks, etc. I'm not saying that Best Buy offers that in the U.S., and it's clearly not free; but that is the only available legal mechanism in some countries.
No. We don't need a special magistrate or specialized referee. No judge or jury can ever know everything about everything. A judge who happened to know a great deal about websites, HTML, Apache, LAMP, Perl, and what-have-you might not know anything about Listeria monocytogenes and ice-cream manufacture, and have to preside over a case about food poisoning (and death) allegedly caused by ice cream. The next case over which the judge might have to preside could be about the failure of a large generating turbine caused by a wear block about an inch square falling out of a recess and into the air stream, going through the turbine blades. The next might be about the quality of paint on some water faucet handles. The next about whether there was intent to create a joint work when author A wrote a study about the effect of something author B wrote, and included an appendix of author B's previously unpublished work. Judges don't need to be psychologists about intent, or polymer chemists, or experts on the standard of care in mechanical drawing and turbine design, or microbiologists or food processing experts -- or ever have seen a web page.
What judges DO need to be is educable. It is the job of the lawyers to educate the judge (or other fact-finder). It is the job of the lawyers to be sure that the fact-finder gets all the facts and concepts needed to decide. The fact-finders shouldn't need to know anything in advance about any given subject; a good lawyer will see to it that the fact-finders are educated about everything they need to understand. The fact that the judge had to ask is mainly, above all else, evidence that a lawyer was failing to do his or her job adequately. Kudos to the judge for telling the lawyers, in effect, "you haven't given been doing a good job of teaching yet; please start doing it better."
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There actually are countries where rentals as such don't exist, but where they have contracts "for purchase with sell-back rights" -- which amounts to a rental. Basically, one buys at 1000 (arbitrary currency unit), with a contractual right to sell back to the original seller at 980 after a week, 960 after two weeks, etc. I'm not saying that Best Buy offers that in the U.S., and it's clearly not free; but that is the only available legal mechanism in some countries.
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No. We don't need a special magistrate or specialized referee. No judge or jury can ever know everything about everything. A judge who happened to know a great deal about websites, HTML, Apache, LAMP, Perl, and what-have-you might not know anything about Listeria monocytogenes and ice-cream manufacture, and have to preside over a case about food poisoning (and death) allegedly caused by ice cream. The next case over which the judge might have to preside could be about the failure of a large generating turbine caused by a wear block about an inch square falling out of a recess and into the air stream, going through the turbine blades. The next might be about the quality of paint on some water faucet handles. The next about whether there was intent to create a joint work when author A wrote a study about the effect of something author B wrote, and included an appendix of author B's previously unpublished work. Judges don't need to be psychologists about intent, or polymer chemists, or experts on the standard of care in mechanical drawing and turbine design, or microbiologists or food processing experts -- or ever have seen a web page.
What judges DO need to be is educable. It is the job of the lawyers to educate the judge (or other fact-finder). It is the job of the lawyers to be sure that the fact-finder gets all the facts and concepts needed to decide. The fact-finders shouldn't need to know anything in advance about any given subject; a good lawyer will see to it that the fact-finders are educated about everything they need to understand. The fact that the judge had to ask is mainly, above all else, evidence that a lawyer was failing to do his or her job adequately. Kudos to the judge for telling the lawyers, in effect, "you haven't given been doing a good job of teaching yet; please start doing it better."