COLUMNISTS The US Supreme Court is mediating in a dispute between a bunch of Taiwanese computer makers and a Korean rival that could affect everyone who buys a computer in America. This is the kind of global clash over property rights that has become increasingly humdrum: a battle, across continents, between the intellectual property rights of one group of world citizens, and the tangible property rights of anyone who owns a computer, a mobile phone, an iPod, or a wristwatch that checks your e-mail, plays a DVD and turns on the news.
It may seem faintly ironic that the new, new thing in legal disputes should be resolved by a bunch of elderly Supreme Court justices whose average age is well over 65 – and who scarcely use the technology whose fate they seal with their erudite rulings. But the most basic principle of law in any civilised society is that it builds on the past to construct the future: so today, the Supreme Court will look to the rules that governed coffin-makers in the mid-19th century, to create the rules that govern computer-makers in the early 21st. Their ruling could affect everyone who makes or sells any of our favourite techno-toys, not to mention anyone who buys them.
