The law is such a double-edged thing. On one hand, the unremitting greed of some people is making our current system of justice unworkable. On the other hand, the law is the only thing that keeps our society from degrading into utter despotism.

Sometimes, the law can have surprising results. Hundreds, if not thousands of years of principles and precedents can interact in interesting ways (emergent behavior again) when coming into contact with scientific and technological advances.

For example, the failure of Microsoft’s appeal of the patent ruling in favor of Eolas. (Eolas won a ruling that states that the seamless running of plugins in Internet Explorer infringes on their patent.) This might just cement the importance of portable, light, web standards, specifically, CSS and the DOM. (What used to require .GIFs and scripting—sometimes even server-side—back in 1993 requires only well-formed markup now. I seriously doubt we will get sucked into a WWW timewarp as some authors fear.)

Then there is the RIAA’s rampage against 12 year old schoolgirls. While in the short run, they might survive this way, I feel like this is the death knell to the old way of distributing music. While Kazaa is outright infringement of copyright, DMCA or no, and while the iTunes Music Store is everything I’ve always wanted, it is still somewhat modeled on the old system (i.e., essentially holding the creator’s works ransom, and taking 80 cents out of every dollar) and the whole system might just completely implode, leading to something completely new and unexpected.

(But back to the idea of the ability to buy just singles, a la iTMS. This will hopefully lead to the trend that all albums will have more and more good songs. The free market, the principles of supply and demand, in action. The cream will float to the top, the shit will sink to the bottom. This is what laissez-faire is supposed to accomplish, but what we call free-market is not really free-market.)