The Supreme Court delivered their opinion on MGM et al v. Grokster today. They found for MGM, unanimously. This basically overturned the Court’s own ruling in the Betamax case, which held that as long as a technology had significant non-infringing uses, it cannot be ruled illegal in and of itself. ‘MGM et al’ will come after BitTorrent next in their quest to have any alternative media distribution model criminalized. This decision will be very helpful to them in that misguided quest.

The Court also refused to hear a case involving reporter’s privilege, a contentious issue that has been fought in the courts for decades. Many people have worked to get this issue before the Supremes, and apparently all for naught. The legal ins and outs of the arguments pro and con are fairly complicated, but in terms of pure right and wrong, and upholding the spirit of the bill of rights, this should be an open and shut case.

Considering their incomprehensible and downright dangerous decision in Kelo v. New London last Thursday to expand Eminent Domain, all in all, I’m not very happy with the SCOTUS right now.

I’ve updated the Flickr Photo Page Enhancer (see this post for more info) again. The previous version was a little hacky, in that it tried to extract a lot of information about a photo from the page you were on, and completely guessed at other information. Now the script does a simple call to the Flickr API to get all of that information. The user won’t notice much of a change, but the script works better and handles rare exceptions (like the photo has no medium size, the original wasn’t a jpeg) way better. Plus, I finally found a reason to play with GM_xmlhttpRequest and the Flickr API, both of which I’ve been meaning to look into. Gods, I’m such a geek.