The court held that European law does not require Internet service providers (ISPs) to disclose their subscribers’ identities to trade organizations for the purpose of civil litigation against them, but that European law also does not prohibit member states from imposing such requirements if the legislation sufficiently balances IP and privacy rights. . . .

I have to agree with the EFF’s analysis: if this is a victory for file sharers, it won’t last long. Europe’s content lobby, if it succeeds in passing either EU-wide criminal penalties or intermediary liability for users’ infringement, will effectively make an end run around the obstacle introduced this week. Nevertheless, it’s good to see some concrete effects of Europe’s well-developed privacy protections vis-à-vis the United States’.

What I didn’t really think about, going in, was that the idea of a golden age is ultimately a little depressing. As much as I might like to imagine how nice it would be to live at the peak of, say, the Beatles or postwar internationalism, it would be a heavy burden to know that the decline and fall was just around the corner. Fortunately, predicting the future is free of any buzz-kills like verifiability or precise dates. Nevertheless, I’d bet some of these golden ages are coming to an end sooner rather than later:

• Airline travel, cross-country road trips (I’d have said this golden age ended with the first fuel crisis), and other petroleum-heavy activities
• American television (The only new-ish shows I’ve been following at all are Lost and 30 Rock. I realize I’m missing out…)
• Seafood (Out of  everything, this  might be  most likely)
• Readily-available pornography
• The Web, as such
  • Specifically, “free online video” (I’d demur — we can do a lot better than hyper-compressed YouTube videos)
• Availability of gourmet food (but not necessarily the food itself)
•  The social standing of nerds (good point!)
• Disposable products (I hope this one’s accurate)
• Boston sports (note that this response was entered before the ALCS began…)
• Free water
• Cellphones (couldn’t disagree more)
• The American dollar (at best, as the commenter points out, we’re at the tail end)
• Physics as we know it
• Traditional manufacturing (to be supplanted by nanotechnology, if not the oil crunch)
• Punditry (yeah, I can see this one being true)
• Laptop DJ’ing (had a good run for a few years)
• Cheap high fashion
• Media piracy (I can’t imagine this going away any time soon)
• Money in politics (let’s hope!)
• Craft brewing, and beer in general
• Philanthropy (to some degree, as Robert Reich would say)
• The American middle class (at least to hear Lou Dobbs tell it)
• America’s National Parks (I’d date the end of this age to the start of Bush’s presidency)
• Leveraged finance
• Zombies not eating our brains (gotta love Metafilter)
• Plentiful energy in general

One closing thought: it’s pretty plain to see that a lot of these responses divide themselves handily into just one category: scarcity. What’s free today, I guess, probably won’t be free forever. This isn’t news, of course — we know that some resources are diminishing (oil) and others are being spread ever thinner (fresh water) — but it’s still provocative (to my non-economist’s mind, at least) to occasionally get one’s bearings on the problems of the world by reflecting that so many of them all have the same basic root. Huh.