Creative Retirement - Friday Roundtable -- Sept 6, 2013

Modern tort law includes four categories of invasion of privacy: Intrusion of solitude: physical or electronic intrusion into one's private quarters.

[Therefore internet spam is a crime as well as telephone solicitation.]

In determining whether intrusion has occurred, one of three main considerations may be involved: expectation of privacy; whether there was an intrusion, invitation, or exceedance of invitation; or deception, misrepresentation, or fraud to gain admission.

Intrusion is “an information-gathering, not a publication, tort ... legal wrong occurs at the time of the intrusion. No publication is necessary.

[1. Therefore NSA gathering of personal information is a crime, they do not have to use it. Therefore the "We just collect but do not read it" statements are both stupid and a confession of crime.]
[ 2. Now we know why we keep hearing the expression, "... has no expectation of privacy."]
when {list: email, shopping in a store, driving down a street}
[If you are not doing anything wrong, you don't have anything to worry about.]

[ One see this all the time. The black-clad cop-commando break down a door and begin a search in which furniture is torn apart, and household contents dumped on the floor, records and computers are confiscated and innocent persons subjected to assault and kidnap. Who pays for repair, replacement of broken contents, for clean up, for losses from non-access to records, for personal abuse, plus time and mental anguish? ]

Conversely, there is too much "protection" in other things.
    Copyright is to "securing to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries for limited Times."
    Data put on the internet may be copyrighted. I have linked to the pages of others and been asked to stop and hve been thanked by others.
    Copyright law has been extended to 70 years from the death of author. Who is the copyright protecting, the author died up to seven decades ago?
    I work with Ogden's Basic English and transcribe early works from the 1930s that are now hard to find so as to make them available to today's scholars. Ogden died in 1957 and I was prepared to make these works legally available in 2007 when the Sonny Bono Act extended this for another two decades. Because I am unlikely to be around in 2027, I went ahead and put on the internet anyway, if anyone sues for my profits, they owe me money. This privacy law interferes with progress.

Another thing, I have trouble considering a snapshot as creative. I have to download a good picture of a WW2 airplane and photo-edit it to have added creative content to legally use it.

A name -- author's character is John Jones, he may have to pay every John Jones for pain and suffering. The Boston Braves. Indian rights advocates say how would you feel if a team was named the Boston Niggers.
I was a Boy Scout and we always thought to be compared to an Indian brave was a compliment.