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June 27, 2005  Lots of great stuff from the Supreme Court today: --Apparently there are some indie rock fans in Justice Souter's chambers, as the highly anticipated (and thankfully, correctly decided) Grokster case produced the following passage: "While there is doubtless some demand for free Shakespeare, the evidence shows that substantive volume is a function of free access to copyrighted work. Users seeking Top 40 songs, for example, or the latest release by Modest Mouse, are certain to be far more numerous than those seeking a free Decameron, and Grokster and StreamCast translated that demand into dollars." I would have changed that to "Users seeking ... the latest release by Billy Ocean..." --The frightening ten-commandments cases revealed that the Kentucky House of Representatives in 1993 "voted unanimously ... to adjourn ... 'in remembrance and honor of Jesus Christ, the Prince of Ethics.'" Mind you that the appellants in question had produced this as evidence that the Ten Commandments displays should be allowed to stand, because it reflects the will of the legislature. For the rest of the world, I would gather, this is further evidence that we need to re-deploy the National Guard to protect citizens from Confederate state legislatures. The only question left over is how Breyer became the swing vote that allowed the State of Texas to keep one of Cecil B. DeMille's gaudy Ten Commandments monuments on its Capitol grounds. And, as if on cue, Justice Kennedy shows some of his right-wing mettle right when it was questioned by the New York Times. --Scalia's dissent in the cable-internet case is a good one, and I happen to agree with him (and his strange bedfellows, Ginsburg and Souter) because the majority position will continue to allow cable internet companies to charge too much for their service. Here's the good part, Scalia explaining why the majority's position--that cable internet service is not actually telecommunication service offered by a telecommunications company and the companies are therefore not required to open up their lines to competition like the phone company--doesn't make any sense: "If, for example, I call up a pizzeria and ask whether they offer delivery, both common sense and common "usage" would prevent them from answering: "No, we do not offer delivery--but if you order a pizza from us, we'll bake it for you and then bring it to your house." The logical response to this would be something on the order of, "so, you do offer delivery." But our pizza-man may continue to deny the obvious and explain, paraphrasing the FCC and the Court: "No, even though we bring the pizza to your house, we are not actually 'offering' you delivery, because the delivery that we provide to our end users is 'part and parcel' of our pizzeria-pizza-at-home service and is 'integral to its other capabilities.'" Any reasonable customer would conclude at that point that his interlocutor was either crazy or following some too-clever-by-half legal advice." |