The Bay Area should care about President Obama's Supreme Court pick for reasons beyond pure politics. That's because Judge Sonia Sotomayor would be the first member of the nation's highest court with a history of cyberlaw rulings.

Wired reports that her decisions "ranged from copyrights in a digitized world to warrantless computer searches, so-called click-wrap agreements and the Patriot Act."

The click-wrap agreements had to do with Netscape's practice of placing their "free download" button high up on the Web page, while their terms-of-agreement link was situated significantly farther down. In 2002, Sotomayor ruled against the practice.

In her copyright case, in 2007, she ruled as a New York District Court judge that The New York Times could lawfully digitize freelancers' work without claim of copyright infringement. He decision was later overturned by the U.S. Supreme Court.