[tptacek]

Under extraordinary circumstances, compelled expert witness testimony has lots of precedents, including situations where experts are required to expend resources to develop that testimony.

People on the Internet tend to believe that technology poses confounding problems for the law, but the law has been dealing with technical challenges for centuries. See, for instance, any case involving a complicated medical issue.

[legalbeagle]

Yes, you can compel expert witness testimony, but this is different. Testimony is answering questions. Here, they are seeking to compel engineering/coding work. I've never seen that compelled by a subpoena.

[tptacek]

If you read old-ish legal journal articles about expert witness compensation, you find that the requirement to do up-front work in order to generate the knowledge required to handle questions is a dividing line for whether (or, at least, whether in the 1960s) expert testimony must be compensated. From that, I gather that this kind of request isn't unprecedented.

[dsp1234]

Under extraordinary circumstances, compelled expert witness testimony has lots of precedents,

Can you name some of them?

IANAL, but the Federal rules of evidence section 706 explicitly states, "But the court may only appoint someone who consents to act."

[legalbeagle]

Compelling expert testimony happens all the time. (You might have to pay for it, but the witness has no choice.) The Apple subpoena is different. It is an attempt to compel engineering and coding work.

[mordocai]

I would argue that expending resources is different from creating something entirely new though.

[alanwatts]

>People on the Internet tend to believe that technology poses confounding problems for the law, but the law has been dealing with technical challenges for centuries.

The problem is different now than it was centuries ago when technology was oil, gas, and steam powered. Now it is electric, meaning information moves at the speed of light all around the world simultaneously.

Such technology is getting better, faster, and cheaper at exponential rates leading to ephemeralization. Meanwhile paper-based political processes have stalled and remain slow as ever.

Say a paper-based political system begins the process of banning a new technology. By the time they finally get around to completing their process, 5 better, faster, and cheaper technologies have already been invented making the old one irrelevant. This is an increasingly important problem to deal with considering the existential nature of paper-based political processes and the rate of technological change.

Paper-based information systems and processes are simply too slow to keep up with the speed of the electric medium. It's like trying to race a lightning bolt.

[petra]

But Darpa sees 20 years ahead, and if they decide to ban a technology ,i'm sure the legal process will be expedient enough.