Once upon a time I spoke praisingly about the nature of the courts. Once upon a time I spoke optimistically about the political future of humanity. It seems I may have spoken a little bit too soon…. http://www.pcworld.com/news/article/0,aid,121603,00.asp

Actually though it does disturb, this doesn’t shatter either belief. I’ve always said that the value of court rulings is that they encourage rather than stifle discussion about the issues they are ruling on. The justices write decisions full of tension and internal disagreements, expressing mutliple sides of complex matters, written by people who, if nothing else, are at least not stupid. The virtue of a trial is not dependent upon whether your side wins or lose but rather depends on the degree to which the circumstance of having the trial contributes to the promotion of justice in the society as a whole. And the greatest way to encourage justice in the long run is to get people to reason deeply about matters of significance.

As for having an optimistic or pessimistic outlook on the world to come, well… Let’s just say this hasn’t made any significant dent in my prior convictions. Things are still bad but not as bad as they look as the saying goes and this particular decision doesn’t mean much of anything since it was about the wrong component of the right topic.

I’ll put this out there though. I read somewhere that people were praising this decision because it conforms with the “correct” view that “everyone” has in their gut that illegal copyright infringement is essentially wrong but nevertheless doesn’t stifle innovation. This is exactly right except for the tone and the quoted words. Yes it does conform with a social value that is being shared by an increasing large number of Americans. The problem is, at the point your gut feeling starts to be that file sharing is *essentially* wrong you’ve already been  lead astray, tricked, or bamboozled. The moral question is neither that obvious nor that simple as people are beginning to think it is (btw it also isn’t *essentially* good either). And that’s why this decision although  it angers me, is really nothing unexpected. The measure of public sentiment swung the wrong way years ago and unless it swings back some time soon there’s no reason to suspect that we won’t keep seeing more and more anti-file sharing measures enacted, supported, defended, and praised.