Because it's all about the people, man
As you know, Bob, Eldred v Ashcroft is the legal challenge to the copyright extension act (passed in 1998, I think), which extended copyright on both previous and future works another twenty years. There's been a lot of discussion of the upcoming case and the entire issue of copyright and the rights that copyright law attempts to balance over the last months all across the blog-o-sphere.
Last week, Eldred v Ashcroft was argued before the Supreme Court.
Lawrence Lessig, one of the primary attorneys on the case, provides a post mortem on his Supreme Court appearance and the case itself. He writes not only with great clarity about the case and what's at stake, but also about his own hopes and fears:
...as someone who believes this the rare case where the law, properly and carefully read, yields one right answer, there is no way I will ever be able to escape the thought that if we lose, it is because I am not the advocate that some could have been. It is the particular hell for lawyers that after an argument, we live in the purgatory of constantly reliving the argument. Every night since Wednesday I have awoken in the middle of the night, to spend the rest of the night reanswering Justice Ginsburg, or asking Chief Justice Rehnquist just how he could distingiush Commerce from Copyright. The kind words of so many notwithstanding, I know and have always known I am not Larry Tribe, or Kathleen Sullivan. And if, after getting this so close to the right result, I have lost this by not being them, then I am not quite sure how I will live with that fact.
All around the net there are reports from people who were there.
Some of them waited in line to get in:
I thought there would be a ton of people in line, but it has turned out to be just us for the first few hours (from 7pm till around 10 or 11pm). So we may have overdone it a bit showing up at 7pm, but there was just no way to know for sure and we didn't want to risk it. (As it turns out, only 25 members of the general public were admitted!)Jace Cooke got there first at 7pm (right when I asked him too!) -- I was still packing up my friend Doug McVay's car with the blankets and things I was bringing, so that made me second in line when I got there around 7:30.
[...]
So now it's 3:00am in front of the Supreme Court and I can't sleep. Jace, Kevin and Seth have gone for a walk around the Capitol, and most of the others are bundled up in blankets sleeping or trying to sleep. (I can hear snoring so I know somebody's sleeping.) It's extremely quiet and beautiful here out in front of the Supreme Court. I'm taking video of it so you can all see for yourselves when I get back home next week.
At about midnight, a group of about eight law students from Virginia showed up. People trickled into line gradually after that. After looking around the Court, we sat down to play a round or two of Set. Next, after dropping my suitcase and suit off in Lisa's hotel room a few blocks away, Aaron and I went off for a while to use some wireless net access he'd discovered on a corner. We must have been a funny sight, standing together on a residential street corner after 1:00 in the morning, intently working on a couple of laptops. (Aaron's laptop backlight was also dead, so, when his laptop's display became too hard to read, he started up a VNC server on the laptop, I started a VNC client, and we used the wireless network to allow him to use my laptop as an interface into his laptop so he could run software there. However, in order to make the wireless reception work right, I had to walk about thirty feet away and hold his laptop up in the air!)
After they let the first 50 in, the rest of us stayed in line. They had to see if all of the invited guests showed up. There might be more seats. Hope springs eternal and all that. But the guests kept coming. "Yes, I have a ticket reserved. I think I'm supposed to go to the Marshall's office to pick it up. This is Congresswoman Bono. She has a ticket also." "Hi, I have a ticket reserved from Justice Kennedy." and so on. Then the clencher:"Hi, I'm Jack Valenti. I'm on Scalia's list." Not "Justice Scalia." Not "I have a ticket reserved by Justice Scalia." No deference whatsoever. Just "I'm on Scalia's list." Whether or not the security guards knew or cared that he was the president of the MPAA didn't really matter. After he went in, those of us at the front of the line mocked him...
"Hi, I'm Jack Valenti. I bought a ticket from Scalia."
"Hi, I'm Jack Valenti. Antonin said to stop by here."
"Hi, I'm Jack Valenti. The VCR will destroy the movie industry."But really, we were just jealous.
And others:
One Justice asked how extending the copyright of a dead person by twenty years would give them extra incentive to promote science and the useful arts. "Was [famous classical dead author] sitting there and thinking, well I'd write some more if only copyright lasted another 20 years after my death? (Laughter from the crowd.)" Olson said that the publisher would be able to distribute more. Ah, one Justice joked, I guess we should give someone the copyright to Shakespeare, since there apparently is no incentive to distribute his works.
My impression of the argument itself is hazier still. Lessig went first, and I thought he got a good drumming from the Justices. But then Solicitor General Olson made his argument, and I thought he received a worse beating. Because of the difficulties hearing, seeing, and staying awake, I honestly wasn’t able to follow Lessig’s arguments. I was awed that the facts surrounding the Statute of Anne were cited and precedent in 2002. I thought we learned history just for the sake of knowledge. I would never have guessed that events of almost 300 years ago would be as relevant as they seemed in that courtroom Wednesday.
See Copyfight for a pretty good roundup of even more reports and reporting from around the Web.
I just think this is is SO COOL.
The web isn't just information. It's people and voice and experience laid out for us in ways we've never had access to before. Eldred v Ashcroft is something that affects us all. Reports from regular people as things happen are something that newspapers and CNN and sound bites and live action don't give us. Contact with people with different life experience and different perspectives and motivations helps us see that it's not just us, that it's not just showboating or esoteric subjects beyond our reach. It's us out there standing in line and getting excited about obscure points of information and caring about the way government and the law works.
It's hanging suits on trees and getting pizza delivery information from security and oversleeping at a crucial moment and random acts of generosity and discovering the sheer exhilaration of history in the making.
It's da bomb.