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| Authored by: Anonymous on Thursday, May 24 2012 @ 02:54 AM EDT |
I think the real issue is that computer science, like many other sciences, often
deals in absolutes. The law lives in a world of opinions and interpretations. As
I see it, the problems occur when the legal mindset attempts to deal with the
absolutes of science and tries to apply opinions and interpretations to them. It
is also why us technical people have so much difficulty accepting the law's way
of dealing with issues. To us, on technical matters there is only one correct
answer, so why do they keep getting it wrong?
This is not an issue of complexity. Both disciplines are complex, but in the
world of software, there tends to be a right and a wrong answer to most
questions. If the judge truly recognised this, when he asked the lawyers on each
side a technical question and got differing answers, that should have set off
alarm bells. It didn't. He just took it in his stride, accepted each answer as a
valid opinion and moved on. Imagine if the question had been 2+2? Should the
judge have been comfortable if Oracle said 5 and Google said 3?
Although the question of infringement started as a legal one, it soon changed
into questions of the mechanics of resolving symbolic references, stacks,
runtimes, and so on. By using the 'legal' mechanism for resolving the answers to
these questions, there was an excellent chance the jury would have been misled
on what are fairly straight forward black and white technical questions.
We got lucky this time. The jury got it right, but that was more by accident
than by design. They could have just as easily been misled on their technical
questions and come up with what was basically the wrong answer. When I say
"wrong", I am not simply referring to an answer I do not agree with. A
wrong answer is one that is reached based on erroneous information and a flawed
understanding. We should feel no comfort in the jury process out of this. We
should not have to rely on serendipity.[ Reply to This | Parent | # ]
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