Do you know what an infinite regress is?
I'll tell you what it is, to spare you the psychiatric bills, for this way lies madness.
Let's say you want to know what we mean in law when we say that something has to be rationally related to something else, otherwise bad things happen, such as that something is declared either inadmissible as evidence or unconstitutional.
All I want you to do is to define rational without using another word that means the same thing, such as based on 'reason' or the like.
This is very hard to do.
I tried it once.
Unless I found the answer, my client was going to jail for about six lifetimes.
He didn't.
That doesn't mean that I found the answer, only that I spent a lot of time looking.
I won't bore you with the details, but I began by looking up words in the dictionary. That was a waste. All the look-ups somehow returned to the idea that something was rational if it appealed to reason.
Suffice it to say that I read a lot of books, from philosophy of science to philosophy, going back to Socrates. Then I hit the pre-Socratics, you know, the philosophers who used to go around muttering, in Greek, "When is Socrates going to show up?"
When you try to discover the meaning of a word and you keep going back and back, and the further you go the further you have to go, that is an infinite regress. Quantum scientists must feel as though they're in a bit of an infinite regress, because every time they discover a little particle and say "Eureka, I've found the smallest particle," they're buddy across the hall says "Eureka my foot, I've found a smaller one.
That's just going backwards, an infinite regress.
What do you call it when you look forward and the same thing happens? Every time you think you've arrived at some goal, the goalpost moves?
An infinite pro-gress?
This doesn't look like progress to me.
What got me into this, apart from the wine, was Prof. Stone's comment on the radio this evening that he would favor a reporter's privilege that protected sources from disclosure provided that what the source disclosed was not a crime to disclose.
For about half-a-second I thought that was a pretty cool solution until the synapses clicked in to inform me that as long as the legislature, Congress or the state, was in session, they could make it a crime to disclose anything. Stone is too smart not to have thought about this, so I suppose he didn't have time to put it into a twelve second sound bite to get it on air, because it sure isn't going to work, as I explained in the item previous to this.
For every move in this game of definition of what will be protected and what won't, there'll be a counter move.
Is that the business the Supreme Court is in, or can they say, "We're not going down this road, for this way lies madness." Maybe this is why they Nine Supremes decided not to take up the Cooper-Miller affair, figuratively speaking, of course. The justices couldn't figure out a way to carve an exception such as Stone noted without creating a new level of problems they'd have to face in the next go-round.
One go-round is as good as another in this exercise.
A similar thing may be happening in the Grokster situation.
Remember Napster? A U.S. District Judge in San Francisco, Marilyn Hall Patel, a very good judge, one who knows when the government is up to skulduggery and doesn't let it get away with it, this time figured that Napster was stealing cookies, or helping those that did. She enjoined Napster and guess what happened. Grokster grew up in its place. Same thing only different. Either way, you could steal songs and not pay royalties. The Supremes this week said the same thing as Judge Patel, no stealing songs written by the other guy, or marketed by this company or that.
But, as soon as the Grokster people are up for getting sued again, guess what. A new guy is going to come along and hack the system so that all the college kids who really need to listen to the latest music so they can be hip and get the chicks can do so. No matter what the law says, and the technology, the game is to see whether the lock can be picked. And we've all read Feynman on locks, haven't we. Any lock can be picked, one way or another.
Whenever the barn is locked, the horse goes out another door.
I think the Supreme Court may get tired of playing this game sooner or later, don't you?
They're in an infinite pro-gress, whether they realize it or not.
There's an article in the NYT, today, entitled "The Court Ruled, So Enter the Geeks," by Jon Pareles, for anyone who wants to see more about this interesting phenomenon. Sub-captioned "The new standard for Internet Robin Hoods: Don't Ask, Don't Sell."