[lazyasciiart]

A case only reaches the Supreme Court if there is confusion over who is right under the law. The Supreme Court decision itself is not a definitive guide to which side is right under the law, as they’ve overturned themselves multiple times. So how do you decide which party to side with?

[defmacr0]

Your view on the law seems a bit alien to me. My opinions on what the rules of the law should roughly look like, are largely independent of who specifically is involved in a legal dispute. Sure I guess if Hitler was being sued and the only way to stop him was this lawsuit by Sony, I would probably concede that on balance it's better to have a slightly worse legal standard around copyright. Otherwise, I think having a law that best reflects my moral views and creates the best incentives for society in general, far outweighs how i feel about the plaintiffs.

As for how I arrive on my views, it's obviously not an entirely rational process, but the rules you get from viewing property rights and self-ownership as fundamental seem to lead to the most preferable outcomes to me. If I were forced to adopt a more deontological philosophy, it's also the one that has the fewest obviously absurd conclusions, though not entirely. From this it's, in my opinion, pretty obvious to be skeptical of copyright law more generally (Ayn Rand would disagree) and therefore I welcome any precedent that weakens it.

[jibal]

I just told you: I side with whomever I think is right under the law.

And your first sentence is not remotely true--or rather, it is quite conceptually confused. Whose "confusion" are you talking about? Not mine, generally. There are of course disagreements about which side is right under the law, but often those disagreements are a result of bad faith--take just about every case Trump has ever appealed up to the SCOTUS. And many of the decisions made by the current crop of right wing ideologues on the Court are made in bad faith, especially Alito, Thomas, and Gorsuch, in that order of corruption. Many of the "disagreements" are based on bogus "textualism" and "originalism" frameworks that are applied completely ad hoc and hypocritically and were invented by conservatives solely in order to provide them with a basis for making rulings based on their ideology (the historical record is quite clear on this).

Anyway, the point was that I decide based on my view of the law, not who the parties are. Since you seem to completely miss the point, have poor reading comprehension, and are just adding muddle, I won't comment further.

[lazyasciiart]

Right. The law is an objective concept, so clear that there can be no confusion, and even apparent disagreement with your objective perception is really just people lying. I’m not missing your point, you’re just disagreeing with mine.

[jibal]

So many strawmen. The only lies here are about what I said.

> The law is an objective concept

I didn't say that or anything like it and I don't believe it.

> so clear that there can be no confusion

I didn't say that or anything like it and I don't believe it.

> and even apparent disagreement with your objective perception is really just people lying.

I didn't say that or anything like it, said nothing about having "objective perception", and said nothing about disagreement with this nonexistent thing, and said nothing about anyone lying.

I made no claim to objectivity, said nothing about clarity of law, or anything else that you're dwelling on here, only that I make decisions based on my own understanding--my phrase was "I think". And yes, you did miss or ignore my point and continue to ignore it while inventing supposed points of mine that have nothing to do with me (further instances of "have poor reading comprehension, and are just adding muddle"). My only point was that who I side with isn't based on what I think of the parties involved.

And what point of yours am I disagreeing with? You said

> A case only reaches the Supreme Court if there is confusion over who is right under the law.

This is factually false, as I and others pointed out. This is all I disagreed with. It's also not relevant to what I had written ... I'll stipulate it to be true if that helps. It's certainly true if "only" is replaced with "sometimes". As I noted, there is typically disagreement about who is right under the law, but "confusion" need not be present. Sometimes SCOTUS--especially this SCOTUS--invites cases from parties they are ideologically aligned with just so they can reinterpret the law to agree with their preferences. Of course, the other party normally disagrees, but even that doesn't always hold, especially with this administration, which is happy to reverse cases brought by their predecessors.

> The Supreme Court decision itself is not a definitive guide to which side is right under the law, as they’ve overturned themselves multiple times.

I agree with the basic point (while not technically accurate ... due to Marbury v Madison, the law is what the SCOTUS says it is), but it's not relevant to anything I said.

> So how do you decide which party to side with?

As I told you: based on what I think. Can I be wrong about the law? Of course. But again, my fallibility and the court's fallibility and whether my thinking aligns with the thinking of the court etc. ad nauseam is not what I was talking about ... what I was talking about was considering the law rather than who the parties were. That's it; that's all. And I made this crystal clear. Whoever it is you think you're disagreeing with, it's not me. You want to have an argument about whether one can make objective decisions about the law, but I never claimed any such ability. All I said is that I side with who ==> I <== think (a fallible process, certainly) is right under the law, NOT WHAT I THINK OF THE PARTIES--not which party I think is more evil, which was the conversation I responded to. That was it---a point about my own behavior. That's all.

JFC ... over and out forever. (If I accidentally see this thread again I shall avert my eyes.)