copyright

With their shapeless black robes and lined faces, the justices of the Supreme Court do not project a particularly cutting-edge image. And for the most part, that's not a problem. The judges concentrate primarily on cases related to either hot-button issues like torture and abortion, or cases dealing with the legal minutiae of how courts should properly function.

As if the security in airports and controls at border crossings weren't slow and intrusive enough, governments around the world are quietly passing laws to allow them to search the contents of your laptop and other electronic devices, like iPods and cellphones. A United States court last month gave border agents carte blanche to hold a laptop for days and even copy its entire contents. The UK government has given its agents authority to search computers at its borders for pornography. But in what may be the most baffling and cumbersome move of all, the US, Canada, UK, and other EU nations are working behind closed doors on a new trade agreement which could turn border agents into the copyright police.

Arguably the most heated and oft-discussed topic in regard to the Internet and all that it has become is the one of copyright. DRM, the RIAA, Creative Commons—you likely cant go a day without reading about a cracked cipher or a new business model in the face of illegal file sharing.

In the MGM v. Grokster case, several major record labels successfully sued a group of peer-to-peer (P2P) software companies for producing software that permitted copyright infringement (that is, online trading of commercial music) when the court believed that a different, less-efficient design might have prevented it. The justices ruled against P2P companies Grokster and Streamcast because they believed that the companies intended for their users to infringe copyright with their service.