A Law Show Set 25 Years from Now 413
aaron240 writes "CBS will be airing a pilot of a new show called 'Century City' tonight, Tuesday, March 16th. CNN has the story. The executive producer, Ed Zuckerman, had this to say about the future state of the law in America: 'Our future is a positive future. We assume that things are basically going to get better, progress will continue,' Zuckerman says. 'There will be problems -- new inventions, new technologies will bring with them difficulties -- but it's a bright future.' He also makes it clear that 'This is not a 'Blade Runner''. Is there any chance it will offer a decent treatment of the issues Open Source advocates worry about today? If he's so positive, could he possibly know anything about software patents to say nothing of SCO?"
Not ANOTHER law show? (Score:5, Insightful)
Is there any chance it will offer a decent treatment of the issues Open Source advocates worry about today? If he's so positive, could he possibly know anything about software patents to say nothing of SCO?
Don't expect it to even come close to issues important to us nerds.
There's just something lacking in a show that focuses on such riveting legal issues as "should a player with a super-accurate bionic eye be allowed to play professional baseball?" Really, this is an actual plot line [nynewsday.com] that will be in "Century City."
Call me crazy, (Score:5, Insightful)
Not too many people find copyright law and open source law rulings terribly entertaining.
C'mon (Score:5, Insightful)
Does that sound like something that would discuss issues like software licenses? No, it sounds like a legal soap opera. I don't think this will outlast a season.
Re:Not ANOTHER law show? (Score:2, Insightful)
The next craze in programming... (Score:2, Insightful)
Seems like cop/courtroom drama is the next reality TV... CBS was definatly all over that (read: Survivor)
Re:Not ANOTHER law show? (Score:5, Insightful)
You may not be interested in sports, but I am, and I'd be curious to see how they argue it, pro and con.
Too bad I don't have a TV anymore.
Re:Call me crazy, (Score:3, Insightful)
Why would he care about sco or anything like that? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Not ANOTHER law show? (Score:5, Insightful)
OSS? (Score:5, Insightful)
Is somebody a wee bit obsessed with SCO? (Score:2, Insightful)
Somebody didn't read the "Important Stuff" about posting, namely "Please try to keep posts on topic."
Re:Bright Future? (Score:5, Insightful)
Well (Score:4, Insightful)
Well done. Blade Runner is well written, original and high quality. This is network sci fi/law drama, respectively the worst written* and the most overused of TV drama settings
*Some of it may be good, but for every Star Trek or Babylon 5 there are 2 Milleniums or Space:Above and Beyonds
Re:Not everyone thinks this is positive (Score:4, Insightful)
"You honor, we plead cybernetic estoppel."
Things are gonna get better? (Score:5, Insightful)
Our future is a positive future. We assume that things are basically going to get better, progress will continue,' Zuckerman says. 'There will be problems -- new inventions, new technologies will bring with them difficulties -- but it's a bright future.'
You know one huge improvement in our lives that this show likely won't consider? Erasing every single law on the books every 5-10 years.
Does anyone find it odd that we have to live, for fear of imprisonment, under a set of laws and regulations so conflicting, non-intuitive, and complex, that one needs a 6 year education to begin to understand the law?
Need an example? Look at Martha Stewart, soon to be imprisoned for basically lying to cops about a crime they couldn't prove she did anyway. Over an amount of money that was a fraction of what it probably cost to prosecute her. And she wasn't under oath. I care nothing about Martha Stewart personally, but the scenario stinks to me.
The US Code is hundreds of thousands of pages. Most of it is rot, laws set by legislatures to grant special priveleges to certain constituencies- or a sketchy, contrived delegation of Congress' lawmaking power- The EPA, anyone?- that we could dispense with and make the country a better place. I doubt anyone can go a full year without breaking a good half dozen laws, even with the best intentions.
So many laws and regulations could only come from a body who is deluded into thinking that the cure to any percieved societal ill is even more government. I suppose I can't blame them too much- when the only tool you have is a hammer, everything starts to look like a nail- but it's far past time to clean house.
Oh yeah, another lawyer show- woo-fucking-hoo. No, I did not read the FA.
Oh yeah, vote for me when I'm old enough to be a Senator, so I can try- likely in vain- to fix it. Thank you.
What is Sci Fi? (Score:3, Insightful)
If I had the CBS writers in a room, I'm not sure what I'd pass out. heinlein, Herbert, Orsan Scott Card, and maybe Necromancer. All required reading even before you get to start the first script. Really good sci-fi, the kind of stuff that clearly understands and reflects history is very rare and very special. I'm going to go out on a limb here, and guess the people who pen the jokes on 'Everybody Loves Raymon' or the plots on 'CSI' are going to be up to the challenge of writing good sci-fi.
Bright future (Score:3, Insightful)
Hopefully he is not saying this from a lawyer's perspective. Here is hoping 25 years from now, the law will have a LOT more common sense than it does now. here is hoping corporate america won't be able to use the law as means of terrorizing joe america.
Here is hoping no 14 year kid gets sued and branded as a criminal for something as trieft as downloading a song or two. Here is hoping no one company can sue and lay claim on the product of hardwork of millions of developers across the globe.
And finally here is hoping that the law and courts be used to settle much more pressing issues like corruption, and crime and not trivial issues like carving of some 10 commandments in front of the court.
Re:Man science moves fast... (Score:5, Insightful)
Well, if the site I link to [lifeaftertheoilcrash.net] is any indication, then the cars will have to run on something other than petroleum products.
Would be interesting to see if the coming energy crisis [dieoff.com] will be covered at all...
Somehow, I doubt it, as ignorance (and/or denial) is bliss...
User Godeke is having a heart attack !!! (Score:1, Insightful)
Get this man a doctor and wheel him into the O/R.
NO! Not the 2003 O/R with our new doctors... wheel him into the 1980 room with Dr. Jeff, who's still using 1980 tools and techniques!!
Re:neat idea, but... (Score:3, Insightful)
He's not alone in this belief -- peruse the Definitions of "Science Fiction" [panix.com] page and you'll see the same sentiment echoed by many successful authors (e.g. Ray Bradbury: Science fiction is really sociological studies of the future, things that the writer believes are going to happen by putting two and two together.)
As for the rest of the show, I think they're being conservative -- it's all pretty much straight-line extrapolations, nothing really radical.
Re:Why would he care about sco or anything like th (Score:4, Insightful)
Investigator: OH MY GOD! LINE FIVE IS STOLEN FROM MICRO-FORD-AOL-SOFT-WARNER!
Software Pirate: Oh no. You have found me. I am in trouble.
I mean, honestly, it's difficult to make something like that interesting viewing.
Re:What is Sci Fi? (Score:2, Insightful)
The same SciFi channel that's giving us "Scare Tactics", John Edward, and that "house of freaks" reality show?
Why only twenty-five years? (Score:2, Insightful)
But Do we really expect bionic eyes, cloned organ donors, and super-surgeries that keep you young to all show up in that time period?
They might. It's possible. But I doubt it; For years science fiction has promised us smart highways, hover cars, and cyborg super-soldiers, all just around the corner. And none of those things have materialized yet.
A hundred years from now, I'm sure things will be very different. But my guess is that 25 years from now will seem about as advanced as we would seem now to someone from 1979. There are still cars, there are still telephones, there are still televisions. There are even still computers. Everything's been refined and improved, but it's still recognizable as the same society. You can't say the same thing about the differences between now and 1904.
Re:Well (Score:2, Insightful)
Hey, now! Space: Above and Beyond was 1000x's better than any of the Star Trek crap since TNG (and even then, I'd still have to call S:AaB better).
Also, you're focusing on the wrong points. This is not going to be a sci fi show with lawyering thrown in. It's a lawyer show that just happens to be set in the near future. Whether or not that makes it any better, I don't know. However, that puts it more in the class of The Practice, Law and Order, and maybe even Ally McBeal (depending on the comedy quotient) rather than Star Trek, Babylon 5, and Space: Above and Beyond.
Trek (Score:3, Insightful)
The Star Trek spinoffs already did a lot of this "ponder the ethical ramifications of new technology" type of thing. The genetically enhanced Dr. Bashir of DS9 raised the same issues as the bionic baseball player this show will have. Picard's arbitrations in various alien disputes were essentially legal drama in space. Janeway's constant ethical delimmas come to mind, particularly the way she always tried to follow her principles even when it was not the best thing for the crew -- much as the justice system must uphold legal principles, even when it is not the best outcome for the specific litigants. In Enterprise, the episode where Tripp is cloned to harvest his brain has obvious parallels to the current debates on human cloning, stem cell research, and so forth.
I'd expect something that puts forth these same kinds of delimmas, but with technology much closer to our own, and an emphasis on resolving them through the legal system. No starship battles, Borg, or aliens with funny latex foreheads. Sci-fi often uses futuristic settings to explore hypothetical ethical issues -- consider The 6th Day (what would widespread cloning do to society?), Minority Report (is knowing someone WILL commit a crime, does that justify preemptive punishment?), or Star Wars (if you have a big spacecraft, is it okay to blow up Alderaan?). Just kidding about the last one. This show sounds like it will be sci-fi lite, taking the same approach to exploring the questions new technology brings, but set in a society that is still a lot closer to our own.
PKD did a great examination of time paradox. (Score:3, Insightful)
The short story is so much better than the movie.
In short, the information you have now determines the choice you make now which determines your future.
In order to make a different choice than the one you made because of your knowledge of the future, you'd need NEW knowledge of the NEW future that was based upon your decision.
Re:Not ANOTHER law show? (Score:5, Insightful)
Another thing they do is to do "ripped from the headlines" plots. And since it takes months for a show to go through production and actually make it to TV, I never remember what the hell they are talking about.
I hate TV
Re:neat idea, but... (Score:3, Insightful)
These two issues are important. There are physical appearance clauses in contacts. As medical technology advances, those clauses will likely become more stringant. Television has dealt with these clauses, for instance in Murphy Brown. I suspect that we will also see cases where athletes are required to take certain drugs, perhaps even in middle school.
And cloning is on everyones mind. Even if we never have a situation where a human is cloned for harvesting, the purpose of sci-fi is to create a dialogue about the issues so we have some understanding of the key points before a crisis situation develops.
I think the coolest technological plot would be a kid wanted to get a computer implant, but the school rules forbid it. Believe it. It will happen.
I've Seen the future, and I've left it behind (Score:2, Insightful)
Look at the trends in American (and world) politics, and tell me we're going to have a shiny happy planet where everyone lives in peace and the law isn't paid for by Microsoft, the Republican party, and the NRA.
World tension, possibly caused by the Pentagon's supposedly dead (but not really) Operation Northwoods (google it if you care); terrorism and hatred -- and because of this, division, not unity ("you're either for me or against me", says the great Uniter); widening gap between super-rich (our rulers) and super-poor (we the servants); environmental degradation (I didn't care about the environment until I caught a fish with two heads and open sores all over its body -- REALLY. Do you eat Tuna? what's in that can anyway?); the universal use of lying, deceit, and the growing apathy and lack of morals EVERYWHERE; immorality of all kinds, and the violent angry response to it; the growth of propaganda and the belief that the truth does not matter, only winning over an enemy; a US government who CHOOSES to have a second cold war and is positioning things to ensure we will be at war forever; loss of privacy; loss of basic Constitutional rights and freedoms; [insert your own corrupt government story here]
And don't get me started on reality tv.
And DEFINITELY don't get me started on KDE versus Gnome, or vi versus emacs.
If you think about it, the probability is extremely high that we aren't going to have a happy future. Looking at the world around you, the facts are undeniable -- unless you have your head in the sand, or don't give a good goddamn about anything but yourself (in which case you're part of the problem; see above). Can you REALLY look at everything that's going on and think the future is really that bright?
And before you answer "Yes", you DO know marijuana's illegal, right? You shouldn't smoke and Slashdot at the same time.
One last thought: the media is NOT an informational tool, but a calming time-wasting distraction to keep you from spending your time researching the real issues that are going to kill you someday. Discuss among yourselves while I fill out my daily Homeland Security reports.
Re:Not ANOTHER law show? (Score:3, Insightful)
By taking place in the future, it might free up the writiers to deal with touchy issues of the present, without treading on someone's toes (think Murphy Brown, Dan Quail, and unwed motherhood). Looks like they already have some, but here's a few future issues that could spark some controversy:
human cloning for disease treatment vs longevity
computer graphic use of the dead and famous in movies and commercials
undetectable computer doctoring of photos and recordings in news reporting
competition in sports between normal and physiologically enhanced players
undetectable biologically induced physical enhancement
advanced math methods in accounting to artificially increase earnings
Wait, I think I've seen these somewhere before...
Re:Things are gonna get better? (Score:3, Insightful)
Let's take social security. Today it's an entitlement. Everyone expects to have it and that it be run the way it always has. The problem is that when it was established, there were something like 50 people working for each person collecting SS. Today it's like 2 or 3 if that. But it's been done the same way so long that people are "entrenched" and will fight almost any change in the policies. They just want it "fixed" but don't want it "changed".
Another example is health care. The US government provided tax deductions to companies after WWII if they provided health care to their employees. Now, companies are EXPECTED to provide health care, and everyone is "entitled" to it. If everyone didn't get their healthcare from their employers we'd have a free market which would mean better treatment, lower prices, etc. Self-employed people and people without jobs wouldn't have such a terrible time getting insurance and the rates wouldn't be so bad. We wouldn't have any of this HMO stuff (which is basically a move to make it cost your employer less).
Basically the problem is that the governement often makes good laws, and then leaves them on the books WAY past the time when they meant anything untill they cause far more problems then they solve and are relativly impossible to fix. Look at any site of weird laws to see all the "people driving on a road must have a guy walk infornt of them with a lantern so the car won't scare the horses" type laws that mean nothing now.
As for the show, I'll check it out. I don't expect much, but hopefully it will at least be somewhat entertaining. That it's entertaining enough to keep me from changing the channel is about all I expect from network TV these days considering how much of it is pure crud. Good shows seem quite rare, and it's even rarer that they survive their first (half) season or two.
Re:Man science moves fast... (Score:3, Insightful)
I remember at that point having HBO (granted, it was beamed instead of cable), mobile phones (granted, attached to cars for power) and a Vic 20 (granted with 8K of ram, of which half was already consumed). I even had digital music on my Vic 20. Most of your examples are communications improvements, but I seem to remember dialing into BBSes at 300 Baud and doing a very blocky version of what I'm doing right now. Changes in scale and speed are assumed in technology over time, but it seems like all the *major* inventions were completed in the early 1900s, and all we have done is improve them since.
I guess I'm jaded or something. Where is the modern equivalent of the invention of flight, the first man on the moon, the explosion of household technologies of the first half of the 1900s? Yeah, my internet connection is *better* than my 300 baud modem, but it isn't a flying car (which I'm still promised, but have no expectation of ever seeing).
This show on the other hand seems to postulate (at least via it's website) that we will perfect everything that we have in development now, 13 hours in the future. Which was fine for Max Headroom, and could make for interesting hypothetical legal issues, but seems agressive to me.
Re:Man science moves fast... (Score:3, Insightful)
25 years ago people were changing typewriter ribbons. Music came on huge fragile disks that wore out a little each time you played one. Research was something you did in a library during hours when the library was open.
I have a car from that era. There are five transistors in the entire car, and all of them are in the radio. My other car is an internetwork which treats the engine, the electric motor/generators, the battery pack and me as peripherals.
If your car broke down, you had to wait for someone to stop and help. No calling AAA from your car unless you were very rich.
Today's Google News includes headlines like "Symantec Details Net Threats", Congress is discussing how to regulate human cloning, and in a couple of hours I'll inject a genetically engineered medicine into my wife's cat.
One old-school sf personality reminded writers that even if men were flying radium-powered spaceships, they'd still be smoking Luckys and be in the doghouse with their wives. Today they have to go outside if they smoke at all, and their wives may be flying the spaceships.
Pick up Spider Robinson's story "The Time Traveler" for perspective on how the world can get unrecognizable in a single decade.
Re:Bright Future? (Score:2, Insightful)