Sigh.

No, publicity rights are a branch of state tort law. Copyrights are a sui generis branch of federal law.

And a copyright release is just a copyright license (or more rarely, an assignment), which means that it pertains to a particular creative work. A publicity release has to do with using someone's face, image, statements, etc. While you could conceivably have them both in the same form, it's rare that you'd need to or want to.

And I assure you, they are not related even the teeniest tiniest bit. Not in their policy goals, or how they originated, or which governments created them, or who gets them, or how long they last, or what they cover. There is no commonality.

Are you too lazy to google for the difference between copyrights and publicity rights? Perhaps this web page from the Library of Congress will help you out: http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/co...

Copyright law is utterly unrelated to publicity rights. You're just stringing words together.

No, not quite.

A mere performance, by itself, is not copyrightable. In order to be copyrightable, a performance must be fixed in a tangible medium. This always raises the question of whether the person doing the fixation is the actual author, or at least a joint author, with equal rights in the work. Basically it hinges on creativity. If the actor is in charge of their own costuming, lighting, cinematography, and direction, and everyone else is just following orders like a robot, with no creative input, and we set aside issues of works made for hire, then yes, the actor would be the sole author of the film. But if the actor isn't in charge of everything which, along with the performance, is being filmed, then they may be only one of many authors, and if it's the actor who is following orders like a robot, the actor may not have contributed any sort of authorship at all.

Burrow-Giles Lithographic Co. v. Sarony is what you'll want to take a look at.

Got some cases you can cite for that?

And publicity and privacy rights, which are what you get releases for, are not copyrights. They are not even vaguely related.

I never even said a word about the lawyers making money. Perhaps you meant to reply to someone else?

Everyone needs many lawyers at all stages.

More seriously, a child -- even a stupid child -- could tell that Snowden faces legal threats, among other threats. It's not foolish of him to consult with lawyers. Besides, you think there are no lawyers out to get him?

Who would want a six digit Slashdot ID? How dreadful!

I believe that the episode you're thinking of was Time Flight. They put the TARDIS aboard a Concorde and flew 140 million years into the past.

Plus don't forget that the domestic telephone network exists nationwide. Even if airlines were magically exempt, telephones still could be regulated.

Hey, I'm totally happy with getting rid of as many jobs as possible through automation, so long as people still get paid enough to live comfortably. The leisure society is where it's at.

But ours are all stuck at the bottom of a big gravity well. Materials mined on the moon, or better yet, nearby asteroids, are not. They could be sent down to us as raw materials to be turned into finished goods here, but alternatively we could begin to industrialize space.

There are plenty of plans on the books for building solar power arrays that could send power down to us cleanly, for example. It's too expensive to build them with parts that come from the Earth, but it might be more practical with parts that didn't.

It has plenty of oxygen and aluminum, which would be useful. Near Earth asteroids are probably a better bet, however.

How could that have possibly happened, given that in 1994, a runaway planet hurtled between the Earth and the Moon, breaking the moon into two big chunks, unleashing cosmic destruction, and casting man's civilization into ruin.

And while it would be good to get rid of mining operations on Earth, replacing it with space mining, the main advantage of mining in space is that you do not need to use a giant rocket to get that stuff into space; it's already up there, and can be used for industrial purposes in situ.

Trademarks are fine, of course.

You didn't create the copyright. Everyone else gave it to you (via our servant, the government). We didn't do this out of the kindness of our hearts; we did it out of self interest. And being a deal made out of self interest, and with you having no real alternatives or bargaining power, it should favor us very strongly.

If you don't like it, don't create anything, and don't let the door hit your ass on the way out.