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...and you can guarantee "Mr. Fiddlestick" will turn up with a knife in him in an alley somewhere with "no suspicion of foul play".
No - he'll just commit suicide. By shooting himself in the back of the head. Twice.
There should be some distinction between a work that has potential monetary worth 75 years after its creation, and something that has no worth 5 years after creation.
Not only no, but Hell No!
If you create *any* sort of differentiation, then it will be exploited so that the big corporations' work gets the max protection, and stuff by little guys gets the minimum, regardless of any artistic merit or monetary value. It won't start out that way, of course, but over time corporations *will* find a way to corrupt the system for their benefit.
Copyright would be just fine if the term was limited to something sane. After all, it exists for the sole purpose of encouraging the creation of new works. Rudyard Kipling won't be releasing any new works (unless he comes back as a zombie, that is), so there is no reason whatsoever to have any protection on his original works.
The sole determinant for whether a work should be in copyright is whether it will benefit the original creator for it to remain in copyright. Not a corporation that bought the rights. Not the creator's children (or grandchildren, or great-great-great-grandchildren). Just the original creator.
I don't see how returning something to protection for a limited time conflicts with the copyright clause, perhaps you could elaborate.
Perhaps not, but try explaining how doing so "promotes the Progress of Science and useful Arts". Do you really think that the creator of something that has actually expired out of copyright into the public domain is going to start creating new works if his (very) old stuff is returned to copyright? In reality, even before the most recent extension of copyright terms it was more than likely that the original creator was long dead before the copyright expired.
Unfortunately, what will happen is that if this point is even brought up, the Supreme Court will simply rule that this is a type of commercial regulation, and hence allowed under the all-powerful Commerce Clause.
All it says is that the President has to sign the bill for it to become law (except where Congress gets the 2/3s to override a Presidential veto). Since autopens have for a long time been seen as legitimate signatures, I doubt very much that there is any question as to the constitutionality of this particular signature.
But why use the Autopen. US Law allows all kinds of documents to be signed via a digital signature, which doesn't require the signer to be in any particular place. And this type of signature has already been used to sign a bill into law - Bill Clinton signed the Electronic Signatures in Global and National Commerce Act using a digital signature.
So why didn't President Obama follow this precedent, signing via digital signature?
The President should be required to digitally sign the text of the bill, and then, if someone wanted a dead-tree signed version, the Autopen could be used, after the text of the digital version and the paper version had been compared to insure they are the same.
I know this whole question is just a bunch of legal hair-splitting. And I would be quite happy if this technicality got that abomination of a law thrown out. I'm not holding my breath on it, though, as certain elements of our government have become quite fond of the powers that were granted to them via the Patriot Act, and won't give them up without a fight.
Look, I'm not into the whole "political" thing.
But it isn't "Mr." Obama; it's Mr. President or President Obama.
You could also use The President or POTUS.
Saying "Mr." Obama isn't just disrespecting him, it's disrespecting The Office of the President. It's tacky.
I believe the accepted journalistic standard is "President Obama" on the first mention in an article, but "Mr. Obama" in the rest of the article. But there's no hard-and-fast rule - just "Mr. Obama" is itself an indicator of respect (at least more so than just referring to him as "Obama").
Also consider that this is the United States - disrespecting our elected officials is part of that whole "freedom of speech" concept...
Who's "they"? Do you mean Stalin (a Georgian)? Or maybe you are talking about the (ethnic Ukrainian) communist functionaries who sent Stalin fake statistics to try to convince him that his economic policies were working well and that there was no starvation in Ukraine?
While there may have been general starvation as a result of Stalin's failed policies, there were special policies put in place that applied *only* to areas where Ukrainians were dominant. Such as the law that if a collective farm failed to meet its quota, agents of the government would move in and seize 15 times that farm's quota, leaving that farm with no food at all.
Exact numbers are hard to come by, but the best estimates are that around 8 million people died in that famine, about 5 million of whom just happened to be ethnic Ukrainians. So others *were* dying. Just not as many.
Sorry, but that quote doesn't seem right.
First off, that van is explicitly designed for this purpose. So it's assumed it has the necessary medical equipment to perform the organ harvesting. In TFA, it explictly states that one of the reasons for the vans is so they don't *have* to have specialized medical facilities in the prisons.
Second, all the drugs used have regular medical uses, and have hopefully been subject to reasonable testing. I'd be really surprised if the doctor(s) who planned for these vans would have failed to consider possible organ damage from the drugs.
Finally, the prevalence of HIV and Hepatitis is quite true in US prisons, but not necessarily in other countries.
But you do have a good point. What about ASCAP and BMI who do regularly sue bars and other venues that play music without paying royalties? They do not require copyright assignment.
Because they are not concerned with copyright infringement. A public performance of a song is *not* copyright infringement.
Under copyright law, you do not have to negotiate an agreement for royalties in order to use a work in a "public performance". Instead, the law specifies a "statutory royalty" that is due whenever a work is used in a public performance, with the rate of this royalty being set by the government (the Copyright Royalty Board). You may, if you wish, try to negotiate with them for a contractual royalty rate different from the statutory rate, but unless you have done so, you are obligated to pay the statutory rates.
ASCAP and BMI are just agents responsible for collecting the portion of those statutory royalties owed to the songwriters/publishers of songs used in public performances. They aren't suing because you infringed copyright (you didn't) - they are suing because in using the work in a public performance you've incurred statutory royalties, which they are (in theory) authorized to collect and fairly distribute it.
(The portion of the statutory royalties due to the artists/labels is collected by an organization called Sound Exchange).
In summary - to sue over copyright infringement, you need to be the holder of the rights to the work in question. But to sue over the statutory royalties for a public performance, you only need to be the agent authorized to collect those royalties.
You forgot another consequence, when the feds poisoned alcohol to make people think it was more dangerous, and killed its own citizens as a result: http://www.slate.com/id/2245188/
Which they tried again in the 1970's by spraying marijuana fields in Mexico with paraquat. Which failed miserably since paraquat sprayed pot isn't really all that poisonous.
The simple fact is that if shenanigans like this are required to convince people the stuff is dangerous, then it's not dangerous enough to justify federal regulation.
Well, they do say that English rap^H^H^H forcibly takes new words from foreign languages. Although this word probably liked it.
Well, given the poor language's upbringing, it's not really all that surprising. After all, it was the bastard offspring of Anglo-Saxon and Norman French (which has a rather sordid history all its own, involving Latin, Gallic, Goth, Vandal, Frankish and Norse).
"Consistency requires you to be as ignorant today as you were a year ago." -- Bernard Berenson