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Rape shield

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Evidence of the reputation of a victim's sexual conduct shall not be admissible in an investigation or proceeding before a grand jury or a court of the commonwealth for a violation of sections 13B, 13B ½, 13B ¾, 13F, 13H, 22, 22A, 22B, 22C, 23, 23A, 23B, 24, 24B, 50 or 51 of chapter 265 Evidence of specific instances of a victim's sexual conduct in such an investigation or proceeding shall not be admissible except evidence of the victim's sexual conduct with the defendant or evidence of recent conduct of the victim alleged to be the cause of any physical feature, characteristic, or condition of the victim; provided, however, that such evidence shall be admissible only after an in camera hearing on a written motion for admission of same and an offer of proof. If, after said hearing, the court finds that the weight and relevancy of said evidence is sufficient to outweigh its prejudicial effect to the victim, the evidence shall be admitted; otherwise not. If the proceeding is a trial with jury, said hearing shall be held in the absence of the jury. The finding of the court shall be in writing and filed but shall not be made available to the jury.

(NOTE TO SELF: Don't forget to leave in the categories (and possibly stub notice) in current version of article!)

Golan v. Ashcroft, 310 F. Supp. 2d 1215 (D. Colo. 2004), was a case concerning the constitutionality of restoring copyright of foreign works that were previously deemed in the public domain by Congress.

The main argument of the plaintiff, Lawrence Golan, was that restoring copyright violated the "limited times" clause of the Constitution. The court rejected this reasoning, stating: "

The case was first filed in 2001, but was not decided until March 15, 2004, because of an intervening Supreme Court decision, Eldred v. Ashcroft. The Court there ruled constitutional a federal law extending the copyrights of all works in copyright at the time.

Among the works whose copyrights were extended by the law at issue in this case are:



Golan v. Gonzalez1 was a case decided by the U.S. District Court for the District of Colorado in 2005. It was originally filed in 2001 to challenge the constitutionality of restoring copyright of foreign works that were previously in the United States public domain by the United States Congress. The main argument was that restoring copyright violates the "limited times" clause of the United States Constitution. The case was heard by District Chief Judge Lewis T. Babcock.

After the Supreme Court of the United States upheld the Copyright Term Extension Act in Eldred v. Ashcroft (2003), the Colorado District Court dismissed the plaintiffs' challenge to that act in 2004.2 The remaining constitutional challenge to the Uruguay Round Agreements Act was dismissed the following year.3

Among the works related to this case were:

Though Golan v. Gonzalez has not been appealed, the Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit upheld a similar ruling in Luck's Music Library, Inc. v. Ashcroft, 407 F.3d 1262 (D.C. Cir. 2005).

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Notes

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  • ^Note 1 : The full title of the case was Lawrence Golan, Richard Kapp, S.A. Publishing Co., Ind., d/b/a/ ESS.A.Y. Recordings, Symphony of the Canyons, Ron Hall d/b/a/ Festival Films, and John McDonough, d/b/a/ Timeless Video Alternatives International v. Alberto R. Gonzalez, in his official capacity as Attorney General of the United States, and Marybeth Peters, Register of Copyrights, Copyright Office of the United States. The case was originally Golan v. Ashcroft, because John Ashcroft was the Attorney General at the time it was originally filed. Full text of this decision is available here.
  • ^Note 2 : Golan v. Gonzalez, No. 01-B-1854, 2005 U.S. Dist. LEXIS 6800 (D. Colo April 20, 2005).

Category:United States copyright case law Category:2005 in law

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Text of district court's decision

Oyama v. California

Supreme Court of the United States

Argued October 22, 1947

Decided January 19, 1948

Full case name: Oyama et al. v. State of California
Citations: 332 U.S. 633, 68 S.Ct. 269, 92 L.Ed. 249 (1948)
Prior history: Judgment for respondents, unpublished (trial court {year}); affirmed, sub nom People v. Oyama, 29 Cal.2d 164, 173 P.2d 794 (1946); cert. granted, 330 U.S. 818 (1947)
Holding
Certain provisions of the 1913 and 1920 California Alien Land Laws violated the Fourteenth Amendment. Supreme Court of California reversed.
Court membership
Chief Justice William Rehnquist
Associate Justices William Brennan, Byron White, Thurgood Marshall, Harry Blackmun, John Paul Stevens, Sandra Day O'Connor, Antonin Scalia, Anthony Kennedy
Case opinions
Majority by: Brennan
Joined by: Marshall, Blackmun, Scalia, Kennedy
Concurrence by: Kennedy
Dissent by: Rehnquist
Joined by: White, O'Connor
Dissent by: Stevens
Laws applied
U.S. Const. Amend. XIV; 1 Cal.Gen.Laws Act 261 (Deering 1944, 1945 Supp.)
Ayn Rand said she wasn't a libertarian, but she's in this category because she is. Similarly, Tim McVeigh said he was a libertarian, but the inconvenient fact for him is that blowing up a building full of innocent civilians is probably the least libertarian-compatible thing you can possibly do.

Implications

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{{off-topic}} The ruling has major implications for any project that serves as a collection of knowledge. Information (that is, facts, discoveries, etc.), from any source, is fair game, but cannot contain any of the "expressive" content added by the source author. That includes not only the author's own comments, but also his choice of which facts to cover, his choice of which links to make among the bits of information, his order of presentation (unless it is something obvious like an alphabetical list), any evaluations he may have made about the quality of various pieces of information, or anything else that might be considered "original creative work" of the author rather than mere facts.

For example, a recipe is a process, and not copyrightable, but the words used to describe it are; see Publications Int'l v Meredith Corp., 88 F.3d 473 (7th Cir. 1996). Therefore, you can rewrite a recipe in your own words and publish it without infringing copyrights. But if you rewrote every recipe from a particular cookbook, you might still be found to have infringed the author's copyright in the choice of recipes and their "coordination" and "presentation", even if you used different words, though the West decisions below suggest that this is unlikely unless there is some significant creativity in the presentation.

The text of US laws is in the public domain, but Thomson West claims a copyright on the page numbers in its printed edition of those laws. By this reasoning, you could refer to a law or even include large excerpts with impunity, but if you reproduce it in such a way as to deliberately preserve West's page numbers, you might be in trouble. This copyright claim was first affirmed in West v. Mead, 799 F.2d 1219 (1986) ([1]) and then defeated in Matthew Bender & Co. v. West Publishing Co, 158 F.3d 693 (1997). The West claim of originality in the way it presented its reports of decisions has been found to be uncreative and therefore not copyrightable, in Matthew Bender & Co. v. West Publishing Co., 158 F.3d 674 (1998). [2]

Another case covering this area is Assessment Technologies v. WIREdata [3], in which the Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that a copyright holder in a compilation of public domain data cannot use that copyright to prevent others from using the underlying public domain data, but may only restrict the specific format of the compilation, if that format is itself sufficiently creative. Assessment Technologies also held that it is a fair use of a copyrighted work to reverse engineer that work in order to gain access to uncopyrightable facts. Assessment Technologies also created new law, stating that it is a copyright misuse and an abuse of process if one attempts to use a contract or license agreement based on one's copyright to protect uncopyrightable facts.

In the late 1990s, Congress attempted to pass laws which would protect collections of data, but these measures failed. By contrast, the European Union has a sui generis (specific to that type of work) intellectual property protection for collections of data.

Other countries

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{{off-topic}} The applicability of copyright to phone directories has come up in several other countries.

In Canada, the appeal-level case of Tele-Direct (Publications) Inc. v. American Business Information Inc. (1997) 76 C.P.R. (3d) 296 (F.C.A.) reached a similar result to that of Feist. However, the Supreme Court partially backed away from the originality doctrine in CCH Canadian Ltd. v. Law Society of Upper Canada. Under the CCH ruling, someone may assert protection in a database where the facts are themselves not copied from another source. eg. A person may assert protection in a collection of her own recipes, but she may not assert protection in a database of facts about persons and their ancestry compiled from census records.

In Australia, the Federal Court decision of Desktop Marketing Systems Pty Ltd v Telstra [2002] FCAFC 112 followed the UK approach in Walter v. Lane and ruled that copyright law did in-fact follow the "sweat of the brow" doctrine. However, Desktop v. Telstra held, as did CCH Canadian, that collections of facts must not be copied from other sources to be eligible for protection.

MLA style

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The current example this page gives (and Special:Cite uses) for MLA style is

  • "Plagiarism." Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia. 22 July 2004, 10:55 UTC. Wikimedia Foundation, Inc. 10 Aug. 2004 <http://en.wiki.x.io/w/index.php?title=Plagiarism&oldid=5139350>.

I think it might be, instead,

  • "Plagiarism." 22 July 2004, 10:55 UTC. Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia. Wikimedia Foundation, Inc. 10 Aug. 2004 <http://en.wiki.x.io/w/index.php?title=Plagiarism&oldid=5139350>.

The MLA Handbook, 6th ed., gives the following example for an online encyclopedia, with no print equivalent, where each article is dated separately (on p. 212):

  • Ross, Don. "Game Theory." 11 Sept. 2001. Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Ed. Edward N. Zalta. Fall 2002 ed. Center for the Study of Lang. and Information, Stanford U. 1 Oct. 2002 <http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/game-theory/>.

Compare the equivalent WP citation (taking out, for obvious reasons, the author, editor, and edition; adding in the time; and substituting the specifics):

  • Ross, Don. "Game Theory." 11 Sept. 2001. Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Ed. Edward N. Zalta. Fall 2002 ed. Center for the Study of Lang. and Information, Stanford U. 1 Oct. 2002 <http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/game-theory/>.

becomes

  • "Game Theory." 23 Mar. 2007, 20:41 UTC. Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia. Wikimedia Foundation, Inc. 24 Mar. 2007 <http://en.wiki.x.io/w/index.php?title=Game_theory&oldid=117422770>.

My one qualm is the size of the date block between all-important article title and work title...

  • "Game Theory." 23 Mar. 2007. Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia. Wikimedia Foundation, Inc. 24 Mar. 2007 <http://en.wiki.x.io/w/index.php?title=Game_theory&oldid=117422770>.

looks a lot better, but the consensus seems to be that the time (and "UTC"?) is important, so I won't push that.

Clarence Thomas's D.C. Circuit opinions

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For Template:Clarencethomasopinionslisted at User:Zenohockey/Thomas.
  • David Kerekes and David Slater, Killing for Culture: An Illustrated History of Death Film from Mondo to Snuff, 1996 (ISBN 1-871592-20-8, paperback)
  • D. M. Mitchell, ed., The Starry Wisdom—an anthology of homages to H. P. Lovecraft
  • Stephen Barber, Artaud: Blows and Bombs
  • The Monk (The Modern Classics Series) by A. Artaud and Matthew Lewis
  • Heliogabalus: Or, The Crowned Anarchist (Creation Modern Classics) by A. Artaud
  • Ultra-Gash Inferno (ISBN 1-84068-039-3)
  • Alan Parker, Vicious. Too Fast To Live..., 2004
  • Simon Whitechapel, Flesh Inferno: Atrocities of Torquemada and the Spanish Inquisition, 2003 (ISBN 1-84068-105-5).
  • Tick, 2000 (ISBN 1-84068-048-2)
  • Index, 2000 (ISBN 1-84068-010-5)
  • Lazy, 2000 (ISBN 1-84068-010-5)
  • Proxy: Peter Sotos Pornography, 1991-2000, 2005—a compendium of five of Sotos' works: Tool, __________________ (ISBN 1-84068-080-6)
  • Kenji Siratori, Blood Electric, 2002 (ISBN 1-84068-060-1)
  • Predicate, 2005
  • Acidhuman Poject by Kenji Siratori, 2006 (ISBN 1-84068-117-9).