| We already have precedent for a state outright saying "fuck copyright": Blackbeard's Law[0]. North Carolina copied a photographer's images and then passed a law saying the images were part of the public record and thus not copyrightable. The photographer sued to get the law repealed but SCOTUS decided that sovereign immunity meant there was no standing to overturn the law. An interesting wrinkle is that Congress already foresaw this and passed a law decades ago waiving state sovereign immunity for patent and copyright claims. But then SCOTUS overturned the patent prong of this federal waiver on the grounds that Congress hadn't proven that states had a pattern of telling patent holders to go fuck themselves. And SCOTUS's reasoning for striking down the suit about Blackbeard's Law was that this also held true for the copyright prong of that law... despite being handed a brazen example of a state nullifying copyright law for their own gain on a silver platter. What this technically means is that your state could, tomorrow, run their own pirate streaming site and not get sued for it[1]. The only way to stop it legally would be to sue end users, which would be difficult to do for a direct download service[2]. As for antitrust and cartels, since copyright and patents are legal, government-granted monopolies, most courts are very loathe to attack them even when they are used in ways that violate antitrust law. You can see this in FTC v. Qualcomm, where an appeals court smacked down an antitrust ruling for this reason. Compounding this is the fact that a very large contingent of judges have been slowly nullifying antitrust since the 1980s under the "consumer welfare" theory that every tech company is built to maximally exploit. I could see California getting away with bloodying Eli Lily & Co's nose. But I would not count on this becoming a future model for evading (ab)use of the patent system. Remember, all the states are still part of a federal government that is very much in favor of the patent system as currently constituted, and there are still things they can do to block California. [0] https://nsglc.olemiss.edu/blog/2020/apr/2/index.html [1] Assuming your state had not already waived sovereign immunity for copyright [2] It's commonly believed that you can't sue for downloads, only uploads. This isn't quite true. At least one court has outright said that both are illegal but infringe on different exclusive rights. I don't remember which court. |