HoodaThunk?

The following is the letter I sent to the Militia, Police, and Public Safety Subcommittee tonite on several bills they are considering tomorrow, 26 Jan 2012. The list of this committee’s members’ emails is here.

Picture yourself as an author, producing an article for a magazine or even a book for publication. In order to make your point or get the particulars of a scene across, you make use of prose from a literary work literally decades old, a work that’s firmly in the public domain. You send the article or manuscript to the publisher, they like it, they print it, you start collecting royalties – all is good. Two months later you receive a bill and a politely but firmly-worded letter from a lawyer representing the copyright holder of the work you referenced informing you that the work has been brought back under a copyright and, since you’ve used these materials in your work, you are required to pay a licensing fee for its use. And you’ll have to continue to do so if you want to continue selling your book or article.

Now, wait a minute, you say, that work was in the public domain! It’s not under copyright! Oh, it was in the public domain, you’re told, but it’s been taken back out and it’s under copyright now. Oh, and make that check out to Mister….

What I’ve just described is not some kind of police-state chain-yankage, it’s a very real, very likely consequence of the recent Supreme Court ruling in Golan v. Holder, handed down this past week. (SCOTUSblog has their usual wonderful coverage of the Supreme Court’s actions in this case right here in case you’d like to look it up.) The Washington Times editors made their dismay with this decision known on Friday and called for Congressional action to start reigning this in:

Members of Congress had been promoting these bills at the behest of Hollywood. Motion-picture and record studios have always feared the march of technology. In 1976, Universal and Disney sued Sony to try to stamp out the videocassette recorder. In 1999, the industry launched lawsuits to stop peer-to-peer file-sharing software and music downloads. Tinseltown has been wrong at every step. Once they resigned themselves to adapt to the market place, studios made billions on sales of videotapes and music downloads.

That’s why it’s time Congress told Hollywood to take a hike. Copyright law has strayed far beyond the original intent of the Founders. Justices Stephen Breyer and Samuel A. Alito Jr. made this point in their dissent to Wednesday’s Golan v. Holder decision. They cited correspondence between James Madison and Thomas Jefferson to show copyright was meant to be a strictly utilitarian device for the promotion of the arts and sciences. “The statute before us, however, does not encourage anyone to produce a single new work,” the justices wrote. “By definition, it bestows monetary rewards only on owners of old works – works that have already been created and already are in the American public domain.”

The logical consequence of the majority’s decision and the ever-expanding copyright push by Hollywood’s congressional fan club is that one day we could be forced to pay a toll to read documents as seminal as Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address, just as current law requires paying a tithe to the family of Martin Luther King Jr. for the privilege of using his famous speech on his national holiday.

I’m afraid I have to agree. I’m all for protecting the rights of authors, entertainers, musicians, and artists of all stripes to profit from their work. But, all due respect to the Justices, the clear meaning of the language in the Constitution was that there was to be a period where that profit was to be protected and then a release of those works into the public domain. According to SCOTUSblog’s analysis, the arguments made to the Court that Congress did not have the authority to put back into effect a copyright on a work that had been previously in the public domain all failed:

Those were the arguments that drew no support from the Court majority.   Noting that the challengers had argued that the Copyright Clause posed “an impenetrable barrier to the extension of copyright protection to authors whose writings, for whatever reason, are in the public domain,” the Court answered by saying: “We see no such barrier in the text of the Copyright Clause, historical practice, or our precedents.”  Neither the words of that Clause, nor the way it has been understood since the first U.S. copyright law was passed by the First Congress in 1790, supports the claim that the public domain is “inviolate,” the opinion declared.

I would argue that to reach that conclusion, you have to ignore the meaning of the term “public.” That term, defined as “of, pertaining to, or affecting a population or community as a whole,” can be characterized in logic as a set that contains all people. That’s all people. Within the scope of the legal boundaries of the Supreme Court of the United States, that’s all people governed by the laws of the United States and obligated to follow those laws. Once something is released into the public domain, that effectively means that it’s owned by all off us, individually and collectively. All of us have the right to make use of that material without further requirement to remunerate anyone – it’s ours. SCOTUSblog says further:

No one, the Court said flatly, obtains any personal right under the Constitution to copy or perform a work just because it has come out from under earlier copyright protection, so no one can object if copyright is later restored.

Again, only if you ignore the concept of what “public” means. In the 1st and 2nd Amendments (and elsewhere, I’m just using these 2 as examples) reference is made to rights of “the people.” As the Court held in Heller v. DC the rights referred to in the 2nd Amendment are individual rights, just as those referenced in the 1st are individual. Each and every member of “the people” holds the right to keep and bear arms and the fact that the amendment refers to the larger group does nothing to diminish that. So, too, the fact that the term is “public domain” does not somehow rob an individual of his personal right of ownership of anything within the domain of the “public,” of which he is a member. Indeed, what is the “public” if not a collection of individuals?

This is an incredibly dangerous precedent. Is it really that far-fetched to imagine that the companies responsible for the creation and development of all manner of medicines might somehow re-institute their copyrights on the forumlas, rendering any generic copy of their drug illegal unless licensed? You know what happens to the cost of drugs, then, of course. Or, perhaps, AT&T, as the decendent company of Bell Labs, might get the copyright on the transistor re-engaged. Every single electronic device in widespread use today depends on transistors. What do you think happens to all of that when the companies making all of these things have to suddenly pay royalties and license fees on everything they produce?

Like the Kelo v. New London decision, I feel the Supreme Court has just abdicated their judgement when they made this decision. Clearly, Congress needs to address this in a fashion that not even the slickest lawyer can turn onto its head.

One of the news stories this week was President Obama’s decision on whether to have his administration grant a permit for a private company to proceed with building the Keystone XL pipeline, a pipe that would run from the Canadian border to US refineries on the Gulf Coast. Obama denied the permit. That’s a quick summation of a decision that contains so many ill effects for our nation, so I’m going to expand on that a bit.

First, understand that my position on America’s use and development of our own energy resources hasn’t changed. We need to be making use of them. And there’s a very, very good reason why, as I said back in 2008:

Within the span of 3 generations we now consider it so commonplace as to be unworthy of comment that people carry around phones in their pockets that are capable of making a voice call from almost anywhere in the country at any time, day or night. Those phones contain more computing power than entire buildings possessed 60 years ago. My phone is a Motorola Q, one of those combination phone/PDA devices. It connects me to my office e-mail, it stores our company’s entire employee directory, maintains a copy of my schedule calendar, and allows me to connect to the Internet from anywhere I can receive signal. (And in the eastern US, especially here in the DC area, that means virtually everywhere.) The average US household is expected, in the next 5 years, to be producing as much data flow to the Internet on a daily basis as the entire Internet saw in 1995. Every house. Every day. The pace of our advancements in information technology, medicine, telecommunications, propulsion, materials fabrication, and host of other disciplines is accelerating at a phenomenal pace and many of us are completely unaware of the ride we’re on. That pace depends – completely – on 1 thing: power. Without the energy to power our research and development efforts, we will go nowhere.

…

Obama’s take on things is that people just need to understand that their lives have to change and they have to use less. He’s fine with sky-high gas prices, he’s just sorry they shot up quick enough for us to notice. His plan for our energy needs, should he be elected, is to somehow make America use 15% less electricity by the end of his 1st term. There’s only 2 ways to do that, ladies & gentlemen, and that’s either to have all of the things you do now take 15% less energy than they do today or that you make do with 15% less of the things you do. To achieve a 15% improvement in energy efficiency in all of the things we use on a daily basis requires research and development. Those activities take power. If we’re going to actually cut the power usage by 15%, how much longer will it take to bring those 15% energy efficiencies to our devices? It takes money to make money, folks, and it takes power to make power efficiencies.

We can’t get there with a power system that we don’t have in place. We can only use the one we’ve got:

As has been said a number of times around the blogosphere, we have a particular energy infrastructure that’s been built over the last century. Like it or not, that’s the infrastructure we have. Only by using that infrastructure to provide the necessary energy for our research and continued production can we build an infrastructure that doesn’t rely on fossil fuels. Trying to do otherwise will bankrupt us at the very least. We should be developing every single domestic energy source we can and there’s absolutely nothing keeping us from pursuing those cleaner sources while we use what we have.

Well, nothing except half-billion-taxpayer-dollar “green” boondoggles that produce nothing and a President who makes decisions like this one.

The obvious mistake made in this decision is the deliberate refusal of an energy source from, literally, our closest ally via a transportation method that doesn’t run through hostile territory and can’t be easily disrupted by unfriendly foreign governments. We hear all the bleating about having to deal with nations overtly hostile to our interests – *cough* Venezuela *cough* – and yet when we’re virtually handed a solid source from arguably the most friendly nation to the US on the planet, President Obama turns up his nose? And pipelines like this are among the most stable of transport methods, unaffected by weather at sea and fully accessible to maintenance crews. Obama and his supporters would rather we have to transfer oil to ships, sail across the sea, transfer it back off…?

It was a mistake from a relationship stance, too. Canadians are feeling justifiably affronted at an American government that refuses to buy oil from them but cheerfully deals with the likes of Hugo Chavez and whatever leadership OPEC has this year. PM Harper isn’t going to just let the oil sands sit and sulk while America comes to its senses. The day after Obama made his announcement, Harper was talking to the Chinese. They’ll be happy to take the oil – which has to be shipped to them, by the way, increasing the chances of a major spill.

Which brings up the mistake of thinking that the environment’s going to be somehow better for this decision. So, instead of buying the oil that we need and are going to buy elsewhere, anyway and having the pipeline company and refineries held to US environmental standards, we’re going to watch the oil sold to a nation that doesn’t give a crap about any of that stuff. The environment – the global environment that the greens all claim to be so concerned about – is going to be worse off, not better, with that oil in China’s hands.

Lastly, all of that work on the pipeline, in the refineries, and the related industries that serve both of them would have to be done to see this project completed. That’s a lot of jobs, and well-paying ones, too. Some estimates run as low as several thousand jobs. Taken collectively, it would likely be tens of thousands. And this from just 1 project, paid for completely by private enterprise and taking not 1 dime of public money. As opposed to the President’s darling Solyndra who sucked up a half-billion in taxpayer dollars and is now throwing literally millions in assets into trash dumpsters.

This isn’t a glitch or some kind of off week for the President. This decision was made with his strategy firmly in mind and he couldn’t care less what the long-term ramifications are. He’s focused completely on getting past November so he can ride another 4 years of this nonsense. I said in 2008 that elections have consequences. This is one of them. America made a mistake electing someone so completely out of his depth to the top executive position in our federal government. We don’t have to repeat that error but we do have to stay alert for the evidence before our eyes.

Back in the 2004 elections the Rathergate episode definitively demonstrated that the mainstream media, Fox News excluded, had turned into little more than the propaganda arm of the Democrats and the Left in general. In what remains quite clear to many Americans as a deliberate action, CBS News and specifically Dan Rather accepted at face value and with no authentication documents that were supposedly going to be horrifically embarrassing to then-President George W. Bush. They chose the timing of the report of these documents carefully, hoping to put them out there with enough time to turn the public against the President in his re-election bid, but with too little time for the President to respond to them.

It was the first real application of the “Army of Davids” effect written about by Prof. Glenn Reynolds. An ad hoc gathering of highly skilled professionals applied their collective abilities and tore the veil of CBS’s authority away to reveal the truth and it shone a very uncomfortable light on Rather and his team.

Fast forward to this week and we’re seeing it all over again. ABC News is at the heart of it this time, giving air time to the ex-wife of Mr. Gingrich who boldly claimed that she could destroy his career with a mere utterance. Without any attempt to actually authenticate anything she was saying, ABC simply spread as vicious a spate of gossip as they could and they did it the night before a presidential primary. This isn’t news, folks, this is just trying to air anything that might be harmful to a particular candidate in the hopes that something, somehow will stick. You’d have thought that ABC would know better – and that CNN and John King would know better than to make it the lead question in the debate CNN hosted – than to try this kind of crap given the state of how easy it is to get background information on these matters and how easy it is for people to respond to such obvious bias.

I haven’t made any decisions about who I support and there are things about Newt Gingrich I don’t like. But I, and many of my fellow Americans, are fed up with the so-called mainstream media’s constant slant to the left and the impetus of the media to do less reporting and do more “gotcha!” hunting.

For anyone who may have missed Gingrich’s response to CNN’s John King, here it is:

This is a great vid. Thanks to Tina Korbe at HotAir for bringing it to my attention!

Nope, not kidding. Via Alphecca, we have this story:

The Second Amendment Foundation and Association of  New Jersey Rifle & Pistol Clubs will appeal a federal judge’s ruling Friday  that “the Second Amendment does not include a general right to carry handguns outside the home.”

Federal Judge William H. Walls, a Clinton appointee, dismissed a case filed by both organizations challenging New Jersey’s handgun carry laws, which have all but eliminated the right to self-defense with a firearm outside the home.

The text of the 2nd Amendment is quite clear in that the right to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed and there is nothing in it that even remotely implies that said right only operates on property you own. No other protection offered by the Consititution is limited in this fashion. Can you imagine for a second the firestorm that would be unleashed were the right to free speech or to worship or to be free from  unreasonable search and seizure to be ruled invalid outside your own home? Preposterous.

And yet, this appointee of President Clinton saw fit to look at existing case law and guidance from the Supreme Court in Heller v. DC and McDonald v. Chicago and conclude that this 1 right out of all of them suddenly doesn’t apply past your property line. SAF intends to appeal this to the Supreme Court where, I would hope, the honored Justices will overturn Judge Screwloose with extreme predjudice. Obviously there are people on the Federal Bench who don’t consider their oaths to uphold the Constitution to be binding. They need a reminder.

I’ve been expecting this since the failure by the Huntsman campaign to even attempt to get on the ballot in Virginia:

Former Utah Gov. Jon Huntsman is expected to withdraw his bid for the Republican presidential nomination and throw his support to Mitt Romney, Fox News learned Sunday.

Huntsman is set to announce his withdrawal from the race Monday at 11:00 a.m. ET at the Myrtle Beach Convention Center in South Carolina, at which time he will endorse his former rival.

Huntsman may have some good ideas and positions but you have to be able to do the work to at least get on ballots if you want to be taken as a serious contender. I mean, in 2008 people were busting Fred Thompson’s chops about “not really wanting it” and he managed to get on the ballot.

It’s starting to look like that failure to get on the ballot isn’t really going to make much of a difference in Virginia, tho. At this rate, Romney and Paul will be the only people still left in the race by Super Tuesday.

I mentioned on Friday that the current Chairman of the GOP’s VA 10th District Committee, Howie Lind, would not seek re-election this year. In his announcement, he reported that he had asked John Whitbeck to run for the seat and that Whitbeck had agreed to do so. Today I got an e-mail from the Whitbeck campaign announcing that Delegate Randy Minchew has endorsed him. From the letter from Minchew:

“John Whitbeck and I have been friends for many years and, while we had a contested primary together last Summer, he and I worked closely together immediately afterwards on my campaign for Delegate and on every other Republican campaign in Loudoun County. His commitment to solid conservative principles and outstanding work ethic was a real benefit to me and all our candidates. After our many victories in November, I urged John to put his good leadership talents to work at a higher level as we gear up for one of the most important federal elections in years.

After Howie Lind advised me of his decision not to seek a second term as 10th District  Chairman, I immediately thought of John Whitbeck as a worthy Republican leader to guide our District Committee to critical wins this coming November. John has my support and endorsement in his quest for 10th District Chairman.”

 

Readers of HoodaThunk? know very well that I hold Delegate Minchew in the highest regard. If Mr. Whitbeck meets his approval, then he meets mine. I wish John Whitbeck the best of luck in his run and the very best in his work for Congressman Frank Wolf in his re-election campaign this year.

Whitbeck for Chairman!

The General Assembly in Virginia has convened for 2012, as I alluded to in this post, and there are several bills that have been introduced for the session that relate to 2nd Amendment protections. Thanks to the National Rifle Association (NRA) and the Virginia Citizens Defense League (VCDL) we have a pretty good rundown of what they are and where some of Virginia’s most prominent defenders of our right to keep and bear arms stand on them. You can view the NRA’s list in its entirety here and view the VCDL’s Bill Analysis Summary here (PDF format).

As any long-time reader knows, I’m a firm supporter of American citizens’ right to keep and bear arms so legislation affecting that area is of great interest to me. I’ll be watching several of these bills as they come through the GA. Of particular interest to me are:

HB 20: Emergency Services & Disaster Law; shall not be interpreted to prohibit carrying, etc., of firearms. This adds the legal carrying, transportation, sale, or transfer of firearms to the list of things that cannot be limited or prohibited during a declared state of emergency. Thumbs way, way up – I approve and I absolutely want to see this passed.

HB 25: Concealed handgun permits; confidentiality of permittee information. This explicity prevents any clerk of the court from disclosing information contained on a concealed handgun permit (CHP) application. Again, given the situations that have occured where personally identifiable information on these CHP applications have been simply broadcast into the public domain, I feel we need to rigidly code this into the law and lock it down.

HB 237: Criminal history record information checks upon handgun purchases; dissemination of information. This bill would cease the practice of running background checks against both the National Instant Criminal Background Check System (NICS) and against the Virginia-specific system and rely on the NICS instead for long gun sales. This cost and time involved in maintaining the 2 system-approach is not justified by the performance of the systems and I think we can just use the national one.

HB 364: Criminal history record information; record check to be performed on prospective transferee. The myth-that-shall-not-die, the so-called “gun show loophole” is still on the Dem’s agenda and it’s every bit as bogus today as it ever has been. It is nothing more than an attempt to prepare the ground to outlaw any and all private sales or transfers of firearms and this bill should be put down as quickly and with as much predjudice as can be mustered.

SB 323: Handguns; eliminates prohibition on purchasing more than one in a 30-day period. Virginia has a law that limits the number of handguns a citizen may purchase to one per month. Arbitrary and useless. It should be repealed/lifted and this bill does that. Pass it.

I would suggest if you’re interested in these matters that you follow the links and get up to speed on the bills. Then make a point of contacting your elected reps and express your desire for them to vote on these bills as you’d like to see.

So the issue of bringing Metro to Loudoun County is quite the hot topic in many circles these days and it’s been suggested that I should be talking about it. Now, before I do, please allow me to repeat what I wrote in my “About” page:

This is my blog, which means I write about what interests me. I do appreciate debate so long as it’s rational and pertinent. I don’t condone ad hominem attacks and I won’t allow them here in the comments, directed at me or otherwise.

Lastly, there are some issues that will be big in the news that won’t interest me at all. Rather than ask why I’m not writing about this or that, start your own blog and you write about it. Send me the link to your blog and we can reciprocate links on our blogrolls.

 

I certainly do appreciate questions on matters and am happy to engage in reasonable debate on a variety of issues. However, I don’t have the time or the interest to write on every topic. Since this one’s been recommended, however, I’ll give it my go.

As with just about any topic that has any controversy at all, you’ll find the extremes where 1 group of people are ecstatically in favor or this or that and the other side where people are vehemently opposed. The Metro system’s plans to come out into Loudoun County is no different. In order to understand where I’m coming from on this, a little history is in order. I moved to this area in the mid- to late 1980′s when the airline I was working for transferred me to their Dulles hub operation. As I was getting to know the area I would occasionally run down into DC, usually on the Metro’s Orange line out of Dunn Loring, and I heard all kinds of people telling me confidently that they were going to extend the Metro all the way out to Dulles. It was a project that would be started any month, now. In 1988. Twenty-four years ago. You’ll notice there’s no Metro to Dulles, yet.

Years have passed and plans have been debated and made and we finally have construction begun on the Silver Line. The line will extend from the Orange Line, just west of the East Falls Church station, out to Route 772/Ryan Road in Loudoun with stations in Tyson’s Corner (4 of ‘em), Wiehle Avenue, Reston, Herndon, near the intersection of the Dulles Toll Road and Route 28, Dulles Airport itself, and one on route 606 just past the airport. Supporters of the line tout the ability to ride all the way into DC and beyond on the system without having to drive through the nations’ 2nd-worst traffic picture, park in the some of the worst parking situations I’ve ever seen, and generally endure the nonsense of navigation in DC. Detractors talk costs and the concept that there won’t be sufficient ridership for “10-15 years” to warrant even having the line. The suggestion that I write on the topic seemed to suggest that I’d be on the detractor side of this equation.

Well, I certainly see the point of the cost. The fact of the matter is that Loudoun County, wealthy as it may be, has struggled to find the cash necessary to fund the things we all say we want and, especially, the things we need. The localities that are seeing the Metro stations are being told they have to pony up the money for contruction and operations. I even suspect that the real reason Loudoun is getting those last 2 stations – technically, the Silver Line doesn’t enter Loudoun at all until it gets past Dulles Airport – is so the planners of the line had an excuse to hold out a hat to Loudoun and tell us to ante up. Detractors also, explicitly or implicitly, don’t want the Metro coming out here because it will bring more of the dreaded development. And, you know, those… those… those… people actually need services when they move here! Things like police cover and firehouses and schools and stuff. And, well, some of those detractor clearly don’t want that.

But, as someone who drives on Route 28 and the Dulles Toll Road 5 days a week, I’m really amazed at the notion that there’s insufficient ridership to justify the Metro. Apologies to those who make that claim, but… bullshit. I’m driving at hours of the day when the traffic is down because there are so many people out here who are traveling in toward the city. The evidence that there are plenty of potential riders is right there in front of my eyes Monday through Friday and to tell me that there isn’t is just ignoring reality. Sorry, but that argument is just dead wrong. Now, if they are constraining their comment to just the 2 stations in Loudoun… that there’s not going to be 250,000 riders boarding up at Ryan Road every weekday, well ok. There’s likely not going to be the kind of ridership the Orange Line terminus at Vienna is seeing, at least not for a while. But is that really a reason to not build the transport infrastructure today? We should wait the 10-15 years until the population of Ashburn and surrounds has that level of density that we need the public transport before we start buying the track and breaking ground?

Another argument I keep hearing is for Express Buses and how they’re so much more efficient and better and more cost-effective. I’ve ridden the buses, folks, and it might be a wonderfully comfortable seat, but you know what? It’s in the same traffic as I’m in in my car. The only difference is I’m not at the wheel. And it takes 6 times longer to make lane changes. When there’s an accident on the toll road, or Route 7, or Route 66, those buses are every bit as stuck as I am in my car and when the traffic is crawling at 5-10 mph, it doesn’t matter that I’m sitting in a comfy seat 6 rows back from the windshield or behind the wheel of my ride, I’m crawling. But no, no, they say, we’re talking about buses on dedicated lanes, zipping back and forth between Loudoun and wherever. Great! Where are those, again? And if this is a proposal to start building such things, where are these express, dedicated lanes going to be on the inside of the Beltway? Or are we just not going to go all the way in?

I’m concerned about my taxes, just like everyone else and I don’t want to see Loudoun get fleeced for something we’ll not be getting much value out of. Perhaps I’m misunderstanding the position being taken by people who don’t want Metro out here and they’re not actually calling for the entire Silver Line to be torpedoed. If that’s the case, someone on that side of this debate needs to be a bit more specific about what they’re proposing because simply keeping the status quo and shrugging off the massive traffic issues we have isn’t acceptable, either. So, unless someone has a real proposal on the table that I can look at and judge accordingly, I’m in favor of building the Metro out as planned.