Nor can they be expected to understand accounting principles in accounting fraud cases. Nor can they be expected to understand tax law in tax cases. Heck, you really can't rely on them to understand theft laws in cases of theft. In fact, I'd reckon that we rely on jurors to understand very little.
That's what the lawyers are there for: to present the evidence and make the case (based on the testimony of experts) to a jury who doesn't get it.
I think there are arguments to be made in support of changing how we use juries in the courts, but this isn't one of them. I mean, this argument applies to just about every case that uses a jury, and it's simply not feasible to expect that jurors be knowledgeable in all the areas that a given case touches upon.
Accounting principles, tax law, and theft laws are far easier for the layman to understand than programming. They deal with accounting and taxes in their everyday lives, and they understand it's wrong to steal. The principles are taught to every child in our society and they put them to practical use throughout their lives.
None of this applies to programming, which bears only the most tenuous of relationships to anything most people will learn or use in their lives.
Most people are exposed to math and to cookbook recipes for cooking food, both areas having strong relationships with programming.
What is harder to grasp is that programming is an intersection of math with cooking. And cookbook recipes are copyrightable, while math is not.
And so the burden lies on the lawyer to describe the relationship between an algorithm and the math behind it. That isn't necessarily hard, but requires creativity and time, plus you have to take into account the short attention span of most people, so you've got to pick your battles. And I guess Google's lawyer did a bad job here.
Yes, but do you think the average layman knows enough to say, convict Enron of accounting fraud? Clearly not. I mean, a significant number of accountants didn't know enough.
That's what the lawyers are there for: to present the evidence and make the case (based on the testimony of experts) to a jury who doesn't get it.
I think there are arguments to be made in support of changing how we use juries in the courts, but this isn't one of them. I mean, this argument applies to just about every case that uses a jury, and it's simply not feasible to expect that jurors be knowledgeable in all the areas that a given case touches upon.