The Supreme Court is hearing a case about the Video Privacy Protection Act, and the Times can’t resist “Be Kind, Rewind” in the headline, which is fair. It’s a law from the era of rental stores with late fees.

The part I like is where it came from. As I remember the history, a weekly paper published Robert Bork’s rental history during his confirmation fight in 1987, and Congress, apparently alarmed at how easy that was and how awkward it might be for them, passed a privacy law within about a year. Which makes it one of the rare statutes where lawmakers protected themselves and everyone else got the benefit by accident. Nobody in that room was imagining a streaming service, an email newsletter, or an ad network assembling a profile from what you watched on Tuesday.

So now the justices have to decide what “video tape service provider” means when there are no tapes and the provider is a company that mostly sells ads. I only have the summary, so I can’t say which way the argument is leaning. But the stakes are easy to see. A narrow reading leaves a thirty-eight-year-old privacy statute covering roughly nothing. A broad one makes it the most-used privacy law in the country, by default, because Congress hasn’t written a replacement in all the years since.

That’s the odd position courts end up in. A deliberately specific law becomes the only available tool, and the judges get to decide how much of the present it can hold.

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