Cloud Computing, Music Lockers, and the Supreme Court 84
An anonymous reader writes "Net speculation has swirled about the DOJ being stacked with media company-friendly attorneys who will throw the consumer under the bus, but in one of the first rulings, the Solicitor General defended network DVRs, mentioned cloud computing and a music locker — which has to be a first for a Supreme Court brief. Michael Robertson chronicles the latest developments and you can read the brief for yourself."
Music locker? (Score:3, Informative)
In case anyone else was wondering, a music locker isn't a gym locker that plays music when you open it.
One example may be music lockering services, which permit users to upload files to a remote computer server and stream that music to a personal device over the Internet.
Smug Contempt of Lawyers (Score:3, Informative)
Logically (most) lawyers don't like to repersent rapists (for example) but they will when paid..
Uh, you do understand the difference in law between somebody who "everybody knows" has committed rape (or some other crime) and somebody whose criminality has actually been established at trial? This distinction is not academic to a lot of people [google.com]. And even people who are convicted or confessed criminals have the right to representation when being sentenced.
Lawyers are known to be friendly to whoever is paying them..
And this is not a sign of their moral degeneracy. No ethical professional accepts a job and then undercuts the client's goals by substituting their own. This is particularly important when you're providing legal representation to the client, because not doing your best to advocate their cause not only deprives them of a fundamental right, but undercuts the rule of law.
Right now, I'm reading this biography [amazon.com] of one well-known lawyer: Abraham Lincoln. (More or less on the top of my list of great Americans.) The school textbook tagline "Honest Abe" actually reflects the reputation he had for extremely strong ethics — a reputation that he used to devastating effect in jury trials. In particular he was known for turning down lucrative cases when he believed the client had a poor chance of winning.
Obviously Lincoln was a lot more ethical than most 21st century attorneys. But even so, he had no qualms about which legal rights he was willing to defend. He was even known to offer his services to both sides in some big cases!
This even extended to an institution that he opposed from an early age, and that he's best known for bringing to an end: slavery. At the time, Illinois had a lot of commerce with neighboring slave states. Slavery was illegal in Illinois, and any slaveholder who brought a slave into the state effectively freed them. But this did not apply to slaves "in transit", which led to some skirting of the law by bringing in slaves for temporary work. Naturally this led to litigation over the freedom of these slaves, and Lincoln represented clients on both sides of the issue, despite his own well-known opposition to slavery-friendly laws.