I wonder though how skewed our view of the legal system is? We rarely hear success stories like there where rulings are made in what is seen in favour of the greater good. Is that the result of either selective news reporting or consistent bad judgement alone or a mixture of both?
However, one thing that is rarely reported, and I'd like to know, is how much the defendants in this case had to spend on lawyers to get these trolls to go away. If they had to spend a lot of money, and didn't recover it, that's a loss. Plus, how much time loss and personal stress/unhappiness did this lawsuit cost them?
If a court system drags you through the dirt and bleeds you dry to get a ruling that most people would agree is common sense, well, that's better than a bad ruling, but it's still a kind of fail.
I think there's pretty good coverage of the egregious attempts to abuse copyright and patent law and due process. I suspect that rulings in favor of limiting IP rights are truly rare, because most plaintiffs are smart enough to drop the case or settle rather than risk setting a precedent that would prevent them from being able to file a similar suit.
Your view of everything is skewed. As a rule, almost everything works "well". Crime is rare, legal disputes are usually settled sensibly, politicians work hard etc.
News is about the exceptions to the rule. "Everything Normal" does not make an interesting headline.
Yes, averaged across the entire population thinks work reasonably well, but among critical subsets of the population (like the technologically savvy) the picture isn't so rosy. For example, does almost everything work well in the realm of P2P mass lawsuits and college student settlement shakedowns? Are there millions of college students successfully defending themselves against shakedown letters not getting any news attention?
I have no actual basis to back up my statement that more technologically-savvy people are entering the legal profession as judges, but it will happen inevitably as each generation gives way to the next.
Ah, but by the time the tech-savvy law students become judges, they may not be tech-savvy anymore.
This is only from my own experience at law school. There were relatively few truly tech-savvy folks out there. Almost everyone I knew still used Microsoft Word to type their lecture notes and outlines. (MS Word is terrible for this purpose - its internal formatting gets weird after a certain amount of bullet points.) I used special software for my lecture notes from a startup, and other students viewed me as "weird". I was also the first law student to use Dropbox to back up my work - seriously. (There were some other law students who were programmers before, but they are a different class of lawyers.)
I'm not entirely sure that a legion of new lawyers who know how to use MS Word, computers and the internet are "technologically-savvy". More tech-savvy than old lawyers? absolutely. Compared to the rest of society? Eh.
