Blog of Billy

Lots of people seem quite up in arms about the decision in Kelo v. New London. I'm mostly apathetic, as I don't really have much passion for property rights of non-consumable goods. They tend to be just another thing that the ownership class uses to keep the working man down. Historically, though, they're not really our property rights anyway, unless one can derive a "right" out of a combination of exterminating and relocating native peoples. It's a pretty difficult choice (evident in the 5-4 for the neg...I mean respondent) because you have to decide if the city's legislature can be trusted to come up with methods for sustaining public good that isn't skewed by the "citizens with disproportionate influence and power in the political process, including large corporations and development firms." As much as I really want to believe that local governance can be a good check against big cap, I can see some problems. Presuming that I can't use this decision to shorten the reach of private ownership at large, I side on the part of the conflict more likely to help the poor (homeowners) over the wealthy (developers). As freaky as it is for me to say, I'd probably hang out with Scary Spice Scalia on this one. He might be the smartest conservative I've ever read, but he's still really conservative. Sorry Denise.

Grokster lost on a 9-0. What seemed to be at issue was that, since they marketed themselves as an alternative to Napster, and actively promoted themselves as a place to get closed copyright works, even going so far as to reply to emails asking for help finding specific closed files. This isn't nearly as bad as I had feared, since it looks like we'll all still be able to share in our Fedora isos via bittorrent, so long as bittorrent stays simply the best way to move large files across a network.

Strangely enough, the example of copyrighted work that Souter gives is "the latest release by Modest Mouse." I had no idea the judicial branch was so hip.