Last night I was once again pulled into the comic tragedy that is Dateline’s new series, “To Catch A Predator.” You’ve no doubt seen or heard of this show, where they have a group of concerned citizens, who’ve christened themselves “Perverted Justice” (clever, no?), hang out in online chat rooms pretending to be teenage girls, trying to lure stupidly-unsuspecting older men into coming to a house for sex. The show’s a real laugh; last night some guy even got tasered as he ran wild-eyed away from that paradigm of serious journalism, Chris Hanson. The older, and often times rather sad, men invariably claim they weren’t actually coming over to have sex with the girl, at which point Hanson reads them off a few choice lines from their explicit chat log, they recoil in shame, the cameramen pop out, and then the police make an arrest; all in all, a pretty solid TV formula.

But there are quite a few things that rub me the wrong way about this show (disregarding the obviously high levels of schadenfreude involved). First and foremost: Perverted Justice? Are you kidding me? Whenever they cut to clips of these people “at work,” we see that they’re a bunch of overweight, ugly, pitiful looking human beings sitting side-by-side in what appears to be a dark basement at one of their parent’s house. They spend their day (or night?) typing away on the computer, pretending to be pre-pubescent girls or boys, having cybersex, downloading pictures of genitals men to send to them, impersonating little girls on the phone, and on and on. Am I the only one who is nearly as put-off by people who engage in that night after night as I am by the older men looking for sex?

Next we have the fact that the men who show up at the houses are arrested. I’m certainly no lawyer and, since some of these guys are going to jail, I guess the laws are in place, but every time I watch this show I get the feeling a halfway decent defender could rip the police’s case apart:

1. This police base their arrest of the predators, when they show up at the house, off of the chat transcripts provided by the Perverted Justice weirdoes. But is the Perverted Justice League of America a reliable sources of incriminating evidence? These people aren’t law enforcement. They’ve obviously got an axe to grind, as they volunteer their free time to do the, erm, sexy chatting. It’s of course laughably easy to alter a chat log– is it beyond the realm of possibility that one of these people could chat up a man online, the man could stop just short of talkin’-the-sexy-talk it takes to reach the level of a crime, and then a Perverted Justice Hero In Our Midst would add in a few extra-raunchy lines text so as to ensure the conviction of a man they know is no good, but who hasn’t yet gone far enough to commit a crime? Sounds downright likely to me. Who watches the watchmen? (OK, I’ll drop the superhero metaphors now)
2. Uh, entrapment?
3. The most troubling aspect of this whole procedure to me is the fact that, try as the might, these bumbling predatory men haven’t actually committed a crime. They’re usually charged with something along the lines of “Attempting to obtain sex from a minor online,” laws vary from state to state. But here’s the thing: when they were chatting online, these men weren’t actually talking to a minor; they were talking to adults pretending to be minors. A small distinction, perhaps, but I think it’s an important one. Did they intend to commit a crime? Surely. But they didn’t actually commit one, because they weren’t actually propositioning a minor for sex, they were talking with an adult. One could compare police tactics to John’s who try to get sex from a police officer undercover as a hooker; they arrest the man before he actually has sex with the hooker, i.e., before he commits the crime. But again, that’s different: that law states it is illegal to offer money for sex. So that’s the law they’re breaking, the actual sex act doesn’t need to occur, and the police officer doesn’t need to be an actual hooker (it’s not illegal to offer a hooker money for sex, it’s illegal to offer money for sex, period). But the men online never broke the law of trying to get sex from a minor, because they never even talked to a minor; they were chatting with an adult pretending to be a minor.

This reminds me a bit of a misguided law passed (and, I believe, repealed) a few years back that made it illegal to possess child porn, or to posses “simulated child porn.” I guess the simulated part was intended to make it illegal to posses pictures or video labeled as underage smut, even if the individuals in the video were actually over 18. But it had some (probably) unintended repercussions: bizarrely, this made it illegal to possess any artwork (think 3D-images) of naked children, which of course threw the Libertarians up in arms because the sole-purpose of outlawing child porn (aside from the fact that it’s quite creepy) is to prevent the child from being traumatized. In the case of 3D simulated child porn, no child was being harmed, and so why should it be illegal? Another side affect of the “no simulated naked minors” law, with much larger ramifications, was that it made it illegal to own any movie in which an actress playing a character under the age of 18 is naked or engaged in a sex act. So, uh, that copy of American Pie in your DVD collection, or Academy Award winner American Beauty? That’s right, bub, your ass is going to jail (correct me if I’m wrong, but I believe the law was eventually changed so that it was only illegal to possess a movie if the actress in the movie actually was under the age of 18, but then people began producing hundreds of examples of classic movies already on the market with bare-chested 16-and-17-year old girls acting in them, thus making the law essentially un-enforceable). The reason I bring up this ill-fated law (aside from the fact that it’s hilarious) is that it seems to me very similar to the situation of the guys getting arrested on Dateline: the “simulated minor” law made it illegal for people to look at nude of-age girls if the perpetrator thought the girl was underage. That never sat right with me.

4. There are other monkey wrenches thrown into this equation that hurts a prosecutor’s case. When these men chat with adults pretending to be children, they often ask the “child” to send a picture. What Perverted Justice usually does is send a picture of the 19-year-old young-looking actress who will be at the house when the Dateline cameras are rolling. This way, the guy will see the girl he expects to see when he shows up at the house. But is it fair that the picture sent to entice the guy into coming to the house isn’t some 14-year-old with braces, but rather a sexy 19-year-old that one could reasonably expect any man to be attracted to? They’re arresting him for trying to shack up with a 14-year-old girl, but the girl he was attracted to is actually 19-years-old; of-age. If the guy went all the way and had sex with 19-year-old actress, would police still be able to charge him? With what? Having sex with a 19-year-old he thought was 14? Can you say “thought-crime?”

My belabored point is this: people should be charged with actual crimes they commit, not with crimes they may have thought they were committing. Don’t get me wrong, I surely symphonize with the intent of the law (not so much with the intent of Dateline, who I can be fairly certain are only in it for the ratings): why not get these sick guys before they can hurt a child. But, unfortunately, to live in a just society, I believe that’s a price that must be paid: a crime has to be committed (yes, someone has to be hurt) before you can punish someone for “doing” it. Nobody wants to stick up for these harmful guys, and so unjust tactics/laws such as these wiggle their way into our system. Well, I don’t want to stick up for these guys either, but I’ll certainly give a hand to our system of justice when it’s under attack by sloppy solutions such as this.

Netflix has decided to sue Blockbuster Online for patent-infringement. They argue that Blockbuster has stolen their ideas of renting movies online which are then delivered via the mail, not charging late fees, and allowing users to create a list, or queue, of movies they wish to receive next. Blockbuster, in turn, is counter-suing Netflix under anti-trust statutes, claiming that the company is trying to set up a monopoly in the internet video rental sector.

I’ll admit to feeling a bit bewildered when it comes to patent law. There is an entire arm of the government set up to research the validity of and grant patents. Netflix was granted a patent for its service (for its way of doing business, really), and so, logically, it seems if they have the patent, they have the patent, and Blockbuster is out of luck.

But the system does not work this way, as Blockbuster can argue in court that Netflix never should have been granted such a patent in the first place, and the court can rule to strike the patent down. So a patent isn’t worth all that much after all.

Being that all of this is up in the air, we might as well take a look at what the case will argue.

1. Should Netflix have been granted a patent for delivering movies via the mail.

This one seems easy enough: hell no. Look, I know patents are getting a bit out of hand, but any logical person will have to admit that being granted a patent for the “idea” of sending a “certain item” through the mail is absurd. Moving on.

2. Not charging late fees.

OK, here we get a bit more innovative, but this still doesn’t past this spaceman’s test. To me, charging late fees was the original innovation. That was an idea. Not charging them is more of a return to normalcy.

3. The rental queue.

I’m willing to give this one to Netflix. The idea of a queue, or even an online queue, of course isn’t new. But here’s the thing: the less a Netflix user “turns around” their rentals (receives a DVD in the mail, watches it, sends it back in, and receives a new DVD in the mail), the more money Netflix makes. Netflix users pay a monthly fee, and the fee remains the same no matter how many movies they rent. The fewer movies a user “turns around” per month, the less money Netflix has to spend on postage, worker hours, etc. for that user. The fewer copies of DVD’s Netflix has to keep in stock. The less a user turns around their DVD’s, the better for Netflix.

For this reason, I conjecture that if a more ruthless company had created an online movie rental site (re: Blockbuster), they would not have instituted a queue which automatically sends out a new DVD as soon as the last DVD a user rented is returned. A more dominant company would almost certainly have made the user wait a couple of days for their DVD to return to the rental HQ in the mail, than go online and choose a new movie they would like to rent. All this would slow things down (users would forget to order a new one, users would have to return to the site and search for a new movie every time, etc.) making for fewer rentals per user on average; for the rental company, this means more profit.

But Netflix put the queue feature in. Because they were the little guy fighting to win customers against the goliath that was Blockbuster, they focused not on maximizing their profits, but instead on creating a better user experience than the big guy offered. The queue, in this regard, truly was an innovation and, I would argue, worthy of a patent. When Blockbuster entered the online rental arena a few years later, they found themselves in the unlikely position of little/new guy, and so they copied Netflix’s formula hoping to steal its users away.

The somewhat ironic thing about all this is that the most patentable feature of all is the idea of movie rentals, period. But this idea was thought up in less patent-happy times, and I think we can all agree we’re happy about that, otherwise Blockbuster may be the only fish in the movie rental sea.