Scopes lost his lawsuit and appeal, and Jane Roe later became an anti-abortion activist under her own name, Norma McCorvey. So the failure of renowned academic lawyer Charles Nesson late last month to prevent his client Joel Tenenbaum to be found liable in a civil suit for $675,000 for illegally downloading 30 songs needs to be taken in context.

Nesson, a hero to Internet geeks, worked pro bono on the case in an effort to undermine the foundation on which the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) had sued as many as thousands of individuals for alleged music sharing. Most settled for a few thousand dollars.

Nesson's point was that copyright law was being used as a blunt instrument to batter those guilty of piracy—or even accused of it and who didn't have the resources or ability to mount a defense.

A noble effort, but Nesson used an erratic approach which seemed to lack a rigorous basis in law, and his client will have to declare bankruptcy if an appeal to reduce the judgement fails.

The RIAA has already been well exposed for its lawsuits, which many judges have found offensive elements to, and some of which have been thrown out of court. Nesson didn't show anything new in the trial about RIAA's behavior. (The RIAA has already said it's changing its strategy, focusing on getting Internet service providers to cut off the accounts of those who share files.)

Still, it was decades after Scopes and many years after Roe that the full impact of decisions were felt. But let's not belittle either case, one about the integrity of science and the other about integrity of the body, in thinking that Tenenbaum might be the future single-word summary of when extreme prosecution for common copyright piracy failed.