If one thing was clear from decisions handed down this week, it's that SCOTUS is clueless on technology
Jun 28, 2014
...The problem isn’t that the justices
are old fogeys. The problem is that the justices were groomed in a field that
emphasizes reasoning by analogy. And analogies were critical in these cases:
The Aereo decision, for example, hinged on whether the
company was more like an equipment provider or a cable company; the Riley
and Wurie decisions addressed whether cell phones are sufficiently
analogous to wallets. But emerging technology is, by definition, about breaking
away from history. Perhaps reason by analogy hamstrings innovation, or perhaps
it promotes impartial decision-making. In any event, it helps explain why the
justices sometimes say such silly things.
Years of tortured analogies at oral
arguments culminated most recently with this week’s cases, but a look back at
decisions from years past reveals an abaundance of strained analogizing. In
past arguments, computers were analogized to typewriters, phone books and
calculators. Video games were compared to films, comic books and Grimm’s fairy
tales. Text messages were analogized to letters to the editor. A risk-hedging
method was compared to horse-training and the alphabet. EBay was likened to a
Ferris wheel, and also to the process of introducing a baker to a grocer. The
list goes on.
“I think there are very, very few
things that you cannot find an analogue to in pre-digital age searches,”
Justice Breyer said during the Riley oral argument. “And the problem in almost
all instances is quantity and how far afield you’re likely to be going.” For
the high court, a prior century or two apparently isn’t too far afield.
The justices are tickled by these
analogies. Justice Kennedy, for example, appears blissfully unaware of the new
definition of “troll,” and covered for his ignorance with a joke during oral
argument for eBay v. MercExchange: “Is the troll the scary thing under the
bridge, or is it a fishing technique?” This raised eyebrows in the patent
industry, where “patent troll” is a stock phrase. Justice Bryer, during the the
Riley oral argument, interrupted a discussion about the GPS capabilities of smartphones
with another analogy joke: “I don’t want to admit it, but my wife might put a
little note [with directions] in my pocket.” (Is the smartphone supposed to be
like his wife? Unclear.)
Justice Alito, arguably the most
analogy-obsessed of the bunch, best summed up the Court’s historical handicap
when he teased Scalia in 2011, saying: “I think what Justice Scalia wants to
know is what James Madison thought about video games. Did he enjoy them?”
But this fixation on technological
analogies is more than just an idle curiosity. It has real-world implications
that are not to be underestimated. Recent years have borne out that if a
technology under scrutiny cannot be analogized to a historically
protected invention, it may be doomed. In 2006, for example, Chief Justice
Roberts doubted that eBay was an actual invention. He asked the lawyer, Seth
Waxman, what the invention of eBay was, and when Waxman explained it as an
electronic market, Chief Justice Roberts responded flippantly, saying, “I mean,
it’s not like he invented the internal combustion engine or anything. It’s very
vague.”...
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