“[Y]ou start overruling things, what happens to the country thinking of us as a kind of stability in a world that is tough because it changes a lot?”
Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer, quoted in an article posted January 11, 2016, on Slate.com, an online magazine.
0 Comments
Ken has a great post at Popehat.com about why learning the “minutiae” of lawyering is important for law students, and why insisting that legal education focus on the “common good” is shortsighted. Read his post, but his point is that if you want to make a difference for your clients, you have to have a firm grasp of the nuts and bolts of lawyering. Lawyering is about serving you, the client, not the “common good.”
In a post last week, I mentioned bitcoin. It’s virtual currency (in case you didn’t already know).
I don’t really understand it yet, and until now it didn’t seem to be worth the trouble to try to understand it. A recent article about bitcoin from a tax perspective (what else?), as well as an increase in discussion of the subject generally, has me starting to change my mind. Via TaxProf Blog. I am by no means an authority on copyright law. For advice on all matters of intellectual property, I rely on my firm's resident intellectual property practitioner, and recommend that you do the same (except when it comes to including your intellectual property in your estate plan, which I can handle).
But even I know enough to know that unless the federal law that establishes copyrights says that a non-human animal can own a copyright, a non-human animal can’t own a copyright. That’s the end of it. But that didn’t deter PETA from filing a lawsuit in federal court in San Francisco, asserting that “selfie monkey” (whose name, apparently, is Naruto, I suppose after the manga character) is the owner of the copyright to the famous photograph it supposedly took of itself. PETA claimed to represent the interests of the monkey. Who appointed them the representatives of the monkey, anyway? A federal judge in San Francisco brought a relatively swift end to PETA’s lawsuit, granting a motion to dismiss the case for the obvious reason I described above. PETA of course had an ulterior motive for filing the lawsuit. That motive is to establish that animals have legal rights that can be vindicated by humans (meaning PETA, of course) on behalf of the animals. It might be a while yet, but it’s going to happen. There will be robot taxis. I’m ready to try one the moment they become available.
It’s not just prison inmates that are stealing taxpayers’ identities and filing fake tax returns to get fraudulent refunds. An IRS employee and her friends were apparently doing it, too.
My previous comments on the subject still apply. |
AuthorThe contents of this blog, this web site, and any writings by me that are linked here, are all my personal commentary. None of it is intended to be legal advice for your situation. Archives
November 2023
Categories
All
|