Ask Lemmy

It’s teaches you how judges think about the law when they’re answering legal questions.

I mean... I want to know that, though.

For non-lawyers, most law that we interact with in our day to day life is more cut and dry: you have to pay for the bus ticket to board, the sale of a product is final once you purchased, etc.

So, I'm a software engineer, right? And, there's this ongoing case that I'm really invested in. SFC v. Vizio. If it's ruled the way I hope it'll be ruled, I'll be able to replace the firmware on a lot more of my consumer electronics devices with fully FOSS firmware that will let me disable things I don't like (tracking, advertising, etc) and add additional functionality (features that the manufacturer either didn't think to include or actively wants me not to have).

I want to understand the legal arguments made by the parties in the case (which mostly center around the intersection of IP law and contract law, by the way; both sides are quoting different snippets of MDY v. Blizzard in support of their own arguments). I've been reading the documents published on that page I linked above to keep track of where it all sits at any one time. And, while the actual trial hasn't started yet, a lot of what's come out makes it feel very promising that indeed the ruling is most likely going to come out in a way that I would see as favorable.

That court case also centers around the GNU GPL family of licenses. I write software on the side (like, not just during my day job) that I own the copyright on and publish under FOSS licenses, and I want to have an understanding what implications it's going to have if I use the AGPLv3 vs an MIT license vs the WTFPL. And I want to know not just what the FSF or whoever has to say about what implications the use of a particular license has, but how judges are likely to interpret it moving forward. (In fact, the SFC v. Vizio case I mentioned above is using a legal theory that runs afoul of the FSF's own interpretation of the GPL family of licenses. If I took the FSF's own "web article"s at their word rather than reading MDY v. Blizzard in that casebook and then looking into SFV v. Vizio, I would have had some serious misconceptions about how copyright licenses, particularly on software, would work and what it would "mean" to put a given public license on my work.)

There are other ways in which I feel I've gotten benefit from leaning what I learned specifically in the way I learned it rather than just from "web articles". There are for sure other folks who aren't interested in knowing that kind of stuff (as is the case with basically any field of study you can name). But I also don't agree that "reading a casebook probably isn’t going to benefit you more than reading a web article" is universally true for all "non-lawyers", regardless of their particular aims.

judges in your jurisdiction could think about the issue in a different way entirely from the case in the casebook.

True. It's worth keeping in mind what jurisdiction something happens in, but then again it's often the case that what happens legally in another jurisdiction can still affect you. SFC v. Vizio is taking place in California, under California law. (The defendant even got it removed to federal court under a preemption argument, but the federal court agreed with the petitioner that that argument lacked merit and granted a motion to take it back to California state court.) But in the U.S., it's very often the case that when something happens in California, it nonetheless in practice (if not in theory) largely have beneficial effects everywhere in the U.S., if not also outside the U.S. For instance, many companies which implement means to comply with certain privacy provisions mandated by California law don't bother limit its use only to California residents. SFC v. Vizio will get me a FOSS OS for Vizio smart TVs whether I'm in California or not.

Plus, a lot of what I've studied is U.S. federal law which affects every part of the U.S..