Talk:Petrella v. Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, Inc.

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"unusual" split

I just removed a line citing the WSJ' commentary that the split was "unusual". Yes, the WSJ writer said that so it's verifiable. But I took it out, because it's undue and, frankly, wrong. (Every IP scholar in the country must have rolled their eyes when they saw that line in the WSJ article.) I get what the writer was trying to do (compare Petrella & IP cases more generally with the general wisdom about the Supreme Court's ideological split) but it was really out of context & misleading in the WSJ, to the extent that it becomes wrong. And pulling out that one point out of that article to put in here is definitely WP:UNDUE, because that's an isolated view of the case (because it's WRONG).

More specifics: In fact, it is not at all unusual in copyright, patent, & trademark matters for the court to split this way. Ginsburg & Breyer are the most common authors of copyright opinions, almost always on opposite sides. See List of United States Supreme Court copyright case law and tabularaza.net compilation. Scalia almost always follows Ginsburg on copyright matters. And many of the other justices flip depending on the specific issue. In other words, in intellectual property cases, the Court is not "ideological" in the traditional and popular Democratic/Republican or liberal/conservative senses. And it never has been.

Moreover, IP is not alone; there are a lot of other areas of law in which the popular idea of conservative/liberal, Republican/Democrat do not apply. The idea of an ideological split on the current Court is popular, and there's certainly some truth to it in a number of areas of law; but there are plenty of other areas of law where it's really irrelevant.

So, discussing the whole question of an ideological split on the current US Supreme Court, and whether it's unusual, and to what areas of law it applies or doesn't apply, and how this has been documented -- all of this is far, far beyond the scope of this one article. And it's especially inappropriate because Petrella doesn't stand out in copyright or IP cases in this split. Let's have an article, by all means, on discussion of Court votes and composition; there's plenty of material for an article on the increasing ideological split on the Supreme Court. But Petrella's not a good example, and I'll frankly be really surprised if, in any article on SCOTUS ideology/party ID, Petrella is used as an example.

We could state that one article said this about Petrella, but then we would have to note that nobody else has ever said it; it's better to just take it out as WP:UNDUE, and leave political characterizations and analyses of the Supreme Court to their own article. --Lquilter (talk) 13:38, 28 May 2014 (UTC)[reply]