zlacker

>>YeGobl+(OP)
Powerful article. What strikes me as a layman (non-lawyer, non-law enforcement), is how prevalent these methods of forensic science have become, without any solid scientific basis backing them up - such as peer reviewed studies with quantifiable evidence. You'd think that in order for the state to take the life of a human being, you'd need to prove it using means that are more thoroughly vetted than "[one doctor] who in 1971 suggested the cause might be violent shaking" (emphasis mine).

>>GlumWo+lb
The closed source DNA testing code used daily just raises so many red flags. It's honestly concerning how basically no one in the legal community understands why this is an issue. This stuff is way too important to be proprietary.

>>Grimbu+Bk
Wanting to weaken or abolish any kind of property right - even the non-naturally-derived government-granted monopoly bargains that form copyright, patent, and trade secrecy - makes you extremely fringe in the legal profession. If you want to be a competent and successful lawyer while holding those opinions you have to firewall half your brain off from the other half. Partially because fringe people who want to change the law make terrible legal arguments[0], and partially because nobody wants to hire a lawyer that's arguing that forensic software should be decopyrighted and its source code forcibly expropriated by the state for the sake of avoiding a miscarriage of justice.

[0] Like me, right now, who thinks we should demand copyright term maximums

>>kmeist+IO
Who said anything about the state claiming ownership of this software? That's a huge leap of logic. We are talking about removing the state's power to use secret software at trial. This is a restriction on the government, not on the software authors. The authors have the right to write whatever software they want. They have no right to have the government use their software at trial.

We have pretty good proposals to deal with this problem. I think the following seems sensible:

https://www.congress.gov/bill/116th-congress/house-bill/4368

>Partially because fringe people who want to change the law make terrible legal arguments

No one has ever changed the law to benefit the rich, no sirree.

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/7/77/To...

It is our current system that is fringe. Copyright is practically permanent when compared to a fleeting human lifespan. Even when copyrights eventually expire, trademarks function as "a species of mutant copyright" to keep works protected forever. Companies like Disney profit off our shared heritage and then lock it in their "Vault" forever. The way human culture has worked for hundreds of thousands of years has been derailed within just the last few generations.

Radical changes to line the pockets of the owning class are sensible and legal and moderate, but wanting even the smallest change to prevent the slaughter of innocents by the Abbott regime is fringe.

Note that I don't necessarily disagree with you that reformers often make bad legal arguments. Making good legal arguments requires good lawyers, and only the rich can afford good lawyers.

>>adfgii+PY
"Fringe" in this case means "outside the Overton window", not "only implemented for a short fraction of the history of the human species". Otherwise we'd have to call suburban living and freedom of speech fringe ideas, because the 1st Amendment is only slightly younger than copyright itself and the formation of suburbs is still in living memory for a handful of 100-year-olds.

>>Partially because fringe people who want to change the law make terrible legal arguments

>No one has ever changed the law to benefit the rich, no sirree.

You followed this up with a link to America's mind-numbingly long copyright terms, so I would instead point out that none of those were extended by judicial fiat. Generally a "legal argument" means something argued in front of a judge about how the law is, rather than something argued to Congress about how the law ought to be. The reason why reformers make bad legal arguments is because they're trying to use the legal system to do an end-run around Congress, because the rich people already own Congress.

That being said, they also own the legal system indirectly. It's staffed by professionals who have a vested interest in a set of rich people paying them money. If SCOTUS said tomorrow that, say, 1A overturns the Copyright Clause, half the legal profession would be homeless by the day after.

Also, trademark as copyright is already precluded by the federal preemption clause of US copyright law; you specifically cannot cobble together other rights into something that looks and quacks like a copyright.