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Orbdev Files US Federal Suit Over Asteroid Claim
chongo writes "Orbital
Development has
filed
legal action against the United States by filing a Complaint for Declaratory Judgment in Federal Court.
After NASA's NEAR
probe landed
on the
asteroid
433 Eros,
Gregory W. Nemitz,
who
claims
to have owned the asteroid since the 3rd of March 2000,
sent NASA an $20 invoice for the
first 100 years of parking and storage fees.
NASA told him to "pound
sand".
OrbDev's
Eros
Project seeks to promote their ludicrous ideas about property rights in
space."
If that asteroid were in Texas, the guy wouldn't be able to collect rent unless he'd lived there at least a year.
(Yes, I made that up.)
"If I gave you everything in the world, where would you put all of it?" -God
READY.
PRINT ""+-0
Right? Or maybe something like Stranger in a Strange Land, where they sue for ownership of Mars but really want to be denied and set the precedent.
I still have more fans than freaks. WTF is wrong with you people?
What is the fine this sort of a thing?
Pointing to a bright light in the sky and saying "mine" doesn't make it so.
Did OrbDev fly up there to mark the boundaries of their claim? Somehow, I think not.
Good luck in enforcing that.
Learning HOW to think is more important than learning WHAT to think.
Gregory W. Nemitz
Address: 8301-252 Mission Gorge Road, Santee, Calif. 92071 USA
Tel: 775-450-6144
Fax: 413-460-6480
Email: gnemitz@orbdev.com
Of course, this is all public information, and obviously I'm not encouraging anyone to contact or harrass Mr. Nemitz.
Then just go here.
Government cannot make man richer, but it can make him poorer. - Ludwig von Mises
And I charge $100 bucks a week for rent. Me thinks he owes me quite a bit of back rent.
Defender of Microsoft and Communism!!!
In a countersuit to be filed tomorrow, NASA plans to subpoena Orbdev officials under a claim that Orbdev owes NASA $38 million in parking fees for hitching their asteroid to NASA's probe.
An unnamed NASA official claims, "It's [Orbdev's] gravity keeping the thing there. God knows our probe has other places it could be going if it didn't have to drag along this dead weight."
Eros could not be reached for comment.
Kevin Fox
Dear OrbDev,
Department policy forbids payment of parking tickets that have not first been duly affixed to the windshield of the vehicle. Please let us know when you have done so.
Love,
NASA
... but unfortunately isn't so. If the judge decides NASA has to pay this could cause serious trouble for future space exploration, for as far as I know most of the lunar and martian surface is already sold. If everybody from now on can claim money if something touches "his" property, this could possibly cause second thoughts. better to say "please place a ticket on our vehicle (harrharr) - and we will remove it as soon as possible".
On the other hand side wasn't there a treaty signed sometimes in the 60's that forbade the claim for extraterrestrial property?
".Sig Stealer" was here
Better watch out! Mr.Nemitz is going to call dibs on Uranus next!
Every one knows that they have to put a ticket on the windshield first!
C'mon, mod me up - It's funny!
(yet).
GROGGS: alive and well and living in
Let's come a little bit closer to "super-routine" (read: daily) space flights before we even think about giving people the (recognized) right to claim property in outer space.
To think about it now would be like a caveman contemplating if he should choose an AMD or Intel processor. We're so far off, it would be somewhat of a waste of time to argue about it now.
I just wasted your mod points! HA!
There are a lot of people who would argue with you that the concept of property rights is the biggest problem with western society.
I personally don't like the idea of property rights in space as we all know who will get the lion's share of them to everybody else's disadvantage.
Once we can effectively enter outer space, and get energy and materials from there, what use are property rights? I'm serious. We can generate more than enough wealth to keep everyone happy, and I don't buy that nonsense that if people aren't paid they won't work (explain OSS to me then). It would be a very different society than we have now, but certainly a better one.
On the other hand, if we don't somehow artifically separate people into 'rich', 'middle class' and 'poor', the wealthy won't be able to use their superior command of society's resources to steer things in whatever direction they see fit. Frankly I think that's a good thing, but naturally wealthy people disagree. Viewed in this light, I can see why a complex system of property rights for outer space would be advantagous.
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
It has come to my attention that certain members of the computing industry are using my intellectual property, commonly known as "mathematics."
While I do not intend to file suit immediately, I would like anyone to consider carefully whether they are using anything which may get them into trouble -- including, but not limited to, addition, subtraction, division, multiplication, and/or any derivative works thereof.
If you would like to avoid any potential legal action, please contact me and we can begin licensing talks.
http://history.nasa.gov/1967treaty.html
From Article II:
"Outer space, including the moon and other celestial bodies, is not subject to national appropriation by claim of sovereignty, by means of use or occupation, or by any other means."
-----
show me salvation, and i'll hate it.
How do you define it if not for a convoluted form of "mine! wanna buy?".
Now, I'm getting curious - how do one 'establish a claim' on a piece of rock that's orbiting the sun? If it's just a cause of calling dids and grabbing what you can, I think I'ld like to claim ownership of Europa (no, not the continent, the ice covered rock thats up there). Not only can I charge NASA for parking there, but if they do find life, I can sue those organisms for not paying rent as well...
Seriously thought, someone should brief these fellows on the international agreements that relates to 'Principles Governing the Activities of States in the Exploration and Use of Outer Space, including the Moon and Other Celestial Bodies'. Pay particular attention to the second paragraph in article I, qouted in full;
Outer space, including the moon and other celestial bodies, shall be free for exploration and use by all States without discrimination of any kind, on a basis of equality and in accordance with international law, and there shall be free access to all areas of celestial bodies.
In short, if NASA or anyone else can land somewhere, they are free to do so. End of story.
Everything in the world is controlled by a small, evil group to which, unfortunately, no one you know belongs.
...and he threatened to crash his asteroid into my house. Not exactly how I hoped it would go.
Defender of Microsoft and Communism!!!
The right to own property is the foremost right of every person and should be defended above all these other "rights"...
Thank you Ayn Rand.
Now let's get real. Property is not inherent. Moreover, the subject of what can and cannot be property is a limited one; slavery is a form of property that was once legally recognized but is no longer in most parts of the world.
What is inherent is life and liberty. Working from these one can derive certain forms of legitimate property, i.e., a presumed legal right to exclusive possession of things one creates, lest he or she be deprived of the labor (life and liberty interest) invested in its creation.
Now tell me, sir, when and how did you make the asteroid you now claim to own?
Peace and love, y'all
"If you do not occupy or otherwise improve your claimed property, you shall be considered derelect and in abandoment of said property and all entitlements therein" ...or similar wording on the US lawbooks for over 100 years now. Or is this a case of what is old is new again?
Bzzzzzt.
You'd better leave America (along with Western civilization, and virtually all religion) behind if you think owning property comes before "welfare" - which, in non-reactionary terminology, means efforts by men, through their governments, to help other men - and before "non-discrimination" - which means recognition of equal humanity and everything that flows from it: equal rights, due process, life and liberty, and all those other things Ayn Rand couldn't imagine living without.
Sigh. It takes a fairly well-developed industrial society to produce people with such effective blinders that they mistake their surroundings for the state of nature.
Lemme quote ya yer holy prophetess: I regard charity as a marginal issue. What I am fighting is the idea that charity is a moral duty and a primary virtue.
Say goodbye to the human race, then. Recognition of human inequality - intellectual, yes, but more importantly economic and social - is a bedrock principle of human morality, as is the value of efforts to rectify inequality. Abandonment of virtue is tantamount to abnegation of one's own humanity; and "self-reliance" (a meaningless idea, given the sociopolitical state in which humans inevitably find themselves) at another's expense is no virtue.
You settle outerspace the same way the Europeans "settled" the rest of the world... a guy sails on a ship to the beach and plants a flag and says, "I claim this land in the name of Spain." What's so hard to figure out? Real Politik, people, you get to own "new" land if you can hold it.
Once a governmental entity holds land then it can enforce the property rights of it's citizens by going to war locally to enforce remote claims. IE: War on Earth to assert property claims in space... War in Europe to assert property claims in the Americas.
I swear you scifi people never paid attention to your history classes.
[signature]
Did someone have to walk all the way to the Mississippi and put a flag there to claim it? Or did someone say, "I claim this land and all land to the 90th meridian, between the 35th and 40th parallels, to be Frungyland." (named after the esteemed sport, of course).
From Article 1
From Article 11In theory there is no difference between theory and practice. In practice there is. - Yogi Berra
I've read books about objectivism. I'm afraid I tend not to agree with it. Not that Ayn Rand ever really admited that anyone but her even understood it.
That alone tends to send up my red flags and move the needle of the bullshit meter at least a lot closer to the red zone.
Now please don't get me wrong. I'm anything but an anticapitalist and not against property rights, per se, but my ideas of such are rather more Thoreauian (who, counter to popular opinion, was a practicing capitalist and clearly would have thought a federal welfare system was a daft idea).
I think one must realize that property in the sense that you own the chair you whittled yourself is something rather different than real property. An insect may recognize the former, but not that latter, although they recognize the looser concept of territory or "personal space."
Real "property" rights are simply an extension into the capitalist realm of fuedal/tribalistic territorialism of the kind that Rand despised. I've always found this a bit ironic. Had capitalism not evolved out of such fuedal societies it isn't entirely clear that it ever would have developed a concept of real property at all. It isn't inate to the philosophy, and one might even argue that it's somewhat counter to it.
People didn't buy land. They took it. By force, and defended it by force. Then they could claim the right to "sell" that which they had stolen from the public domain. All real property comes from such a background.
So, you want to claim ownership to an asteroid? Well buddy, you better get your ass out there and build a castle. Then when someone else comes along you tell them to shove off or pay the toll.
If they're sitting there and you can't march the knights out of the castle to defend "your" land, well, guess what, you never owned it in the first place. Where there is no prexisting local legal jurisdiction it's back to might makes right.
Or in the more colorful vernacular, Shit or get off the pot.
If you yourself think we're going to develop property "rights" to space through some local process you're just as daft. We're going to fight and kill for them, just as we always have. And when we "discover" the "people" who already "own" a bit of space we might well expect them to take exception to that and fight back.
Quite frankly I'm already rooting for them, because we've got no fucking right.
KFG
Valentine ends up the sole inheritor of his mother's space-drive engine and the surface of the martian world (due to squatters rights IIRC - IANAL).
A large part of the book is about the governments attempts to take possession of these assets... hence the original poster was correct in his analysis.
Not to say that "The man who sold the moon" is not also applicable in this context, only that it does not preclude SIASL.
Can you "grock" it??
Q.
Insert Signature Here
Typically iron found in Space is contaminated with platinium, normally by about .005 or one-half of one percent. Assuming that 433 Eros is only 5% iron, there are 22.5 billion tons of platinium on the asteroid. The current price for platinium is about $750 per troy ounce. There are 29,167 troy ounces per short ton for a total 656,250,000,000,000 troy ounces. At today's price, that is $492,187,500,000,000,000 (~1/2 quintillion dollars).
Thanks for calculating it for us... now pay up. :)
While "real" capital is necessary for capitalism to function - that is you need clear property ownership rights - I doubt anyone who has never been in space could lay such a claim. If the property cannot be visited, traded, or borrowed against then it isn't really property or capital at all is it?
(FYI: this is why many 3rd world countries who try capitalism don't do that well, or at least part of the reason. In the western world it is so ingrained that we don't even think about it, but I can buy a house and be reasonably sure that I own the property and will continue to do so. I can take out a small business loan against it. I can sell it and make money. Imagine living somewhere where you can't necessarily get a clean title to anything. Imagine it takes years, thousands of dollars, and visiting hundreds of government offices to setup a legitimate business due to all the red tape. We are fortunate enough to have clear property rights established. Our capital is legitimately moveable and that's what makes it work.)
Natural != (nontoxic || beneficial)
The obvious route to take would be to legislate (as international law, not US law) that you can only lay claim to Extra Terrestrial Real Estate (ETRE from now on) if you can land on it.
This would indeed solve the immediate story - keep the loonies out of courts and from having any legal basis for such claims.
It would, however, create some bigger problems.
Here's a few probs with "Landers-Keepers":
1. Instead of starting stellar colonization as a single political entity (eg humanity/earth), we'll just start another colony race (eg china vs US for example, like Britain vs. France vs. lesser colonizers a century ago) and deepen division between world powers instead of using this exact endeavor to bridge across and achieve something together.
2. What's to prevent someone with a home-made rocket (eg starchaser, or the X-prize-winner-to-be) from actually landing there and forming his own country? would that be in the best interests of you? me? the US? Humanity?
And this brings us to the big kahoona.
3. Whose interests do we aim to serve by this sort of legislation?
The US? I daresay Europe and Asia will disagree.
The UN? The UN is just short of owned by 1 billion oil-supplying muslims. That wouldn't be so bad at all, if the muslim world hadn't been a poverty-stricken, politically-faltering, violence-promoting human-life-has-no-value culture at the core of which lies Jihad upon which quite a large chunk of the world's next generation of muslims are raised.
Even richer arab countries like Saudi Arabia are extremely polarized between westernization-seekers and this ugly side of the Islam.
I daresay that the US will disagree to serve these radicals and their agendas.
Humanity _does_ include 1 billion arabs and you can't exclude them. But when you count humanity as a whole, you suddenly realize that there is no common agenda to serve by ETRE legislation. You are eventually going to displease a large portion of this planet.
Finally, I'll point out that legislation on this is entire nonsense in itself, as legislation is useless without some form of enforcement. Face it, if the moon belongs to NASA and some rogue party lands on it, there is NOBODY that can remove him and throw him in jail.
The best solution would probbably be:
a. Keep working hard to eventually reach ETRE.
Ignore mosquito bites like the article above. At this stage, a space race actually serves humanity quite well, as it drives tech development faster.
b. Keep this legally vague for as long as possible (until someone can actually sheriff ETRE). If this doesn't clarify for a while yet, the arab world might by then reach the point where (Golda Meir quote) "They love their children more than they hate someone else's".
Wait for an entity that all humanity can trust to appear and pose a common-to-all agenda. Then and only then legislate something along the lines of
"ETRE initially belongs to said entity" and then be distributed and regulated much like US soil real estate.
Cheers.
-
is invite Gregory W. Nemitz down to Cape Canaveral to view the next launch of a space shuttle.
They can set him up with a lawn chair, a cooler of beer and an umbrella to keep the sun off as he sits under the shuttle with an excellent view of the main engines.
I think this is why space is so big. So the idiots don't get out and annoy everyone else. If a civilization is still arguing over silly stuff like this, it won't have time to advance.
Incredible. The universe is idiot-proof.
Don't think of it as a flame---it's more like an argument that does 3d6 fire damage
The guy claims that treaty does not apply, because he is not trying to annex the asteroid as part of a nation. He claims it as personal property, like a house or a wristwatch.
Hmmm...
Looks like Eros has the disctinction of being the only celestial body known to man that is both shaped like, and owned by an enormous prick!
Bowie J. Poag
Thank you Ayn Rand.
Thanks, whig, you just made my night. I'd say Ayn Rand was the devil if she deserved such a high title. Her writing is trash; her ideas are trash; and to include her in the world of academia and serious discussion is a crime against humanity: Ayn Rand is... shite, 'writing' under the guise of 'equality' and self preservation. She'd be Hitler, except that he did like others like him.
porp
Dear NASA,
Please be advised that your vehicle has hereby been impounded.
It is being held on the same asteroid in our newly-formed impound area.
Attempting to remove your vehicle from the impound lot without authorization will result in criminal penalties and the possibility of severe tire damage.
Love,
OrbDev
-- My Weblog.
But sending NASA an invoice that they pay might....
Luckily the clerk wasn't asleep and NASA didn't actually pay.
paintball
In theory there is no difference between theory and practice. In practice there is. - Yogi Berra
He's got balls the size of 433 Eros.
I find your ideas intriguing and I wish to subscribe to your newsletter.
I live in the netherlands, where we do have a captialistic/socialistic system, and it seems to be the best solution available at the moment.
Doesn't mean it's a good system, it's the least bad.
I'd prefer a system without the concept of money with people working because of the intellectual challenges, not because of the money, but I don't see a workable implementation of such a system in the near future, the problem is there will always be people too lazy to work if they won't get paid.
What needs to be done is that technology has to advance to such a stadium that working is optional, everything should be automated except for the fun stuff (like inventing new things).
NASA should pay up, and then claim against him for any damage that occurs to their probe - which in the hostile environment of space will be quite a bit.
:-)
Unless he's written a contract to the contrary, I suggest he could be held liable for the damage. I doubt he has posted any signs disclaiming responsibility
I feel compelled to respond on this as I feel it could be the most important issue of the 21st century - especially if the X Prize boys get their mojo on.
Property rights essentially appeared at the same time as the Agricultural Revolution about twelve to fifteen thousand years ago. For the first time, you really couldn't move down the valley a bit if someone you didn't like lived near you. You had a field, and that was the only way your (suddenly) large family could live through the winter. If you let him take or use what you'd literally broken yourself to create - you would die. Harsh stuff, and the reason the core of every successful legal system in the world enshrines property rights over all others. Even the U.S. constitution has property rights so mixed in, so tightly bound, that it mentions them again and again - they were as natural and obvious to the founding fathers as breathing.
So we move on to an age where agriculture is no longer quite as central to our lives. Suddenly we are coming up against the limits of property rights. "Intellectual Property" seems to be an obvious idea to an industrial economy - a simple extension of the concept that's allowed the human population to take over the world. As the discussions on /. have shown, this is no longer quite so obvious, so compelling.
Already you can see where I'm leading. If we take the idea of ownership as we normally see it and then apply it to the stars we come into some severe problems.
No consortium of insurance companies in the world, not even the whole of the Lloyds of London market could insure against a mis-directed asteroid impacting with the Pacific. So how could any mining corporation ever hope to start liberating resources from our solar system? Remember that the Lloyds market is the clearing-house for all insurance and re-insurance in the world, and even they struggled to swallow the risk from the Space Shuttle. Even then it took the intervention of the U.S. Government as insurer-of-last-resort to placate the market-makers.
So don't take responsibility: Let anyone get on with doing what they want? No claim means no liability? Right?
What happens when two mining companies lay claim to the same stretch of asteroids? If they are in the same orbit, and therefore easier to get at, both companies are going to want to protect their investment. Do we want to return to the days when warring villages were continuously slaughtering each other? When simply travelling outside the palisade meant risking death?
Here's another example. What if settlers arrive, and then someone else causes problems - e.g. their solar arrays are rendered useless by the cloud of particulates raised by a "nearby" extraction operation. They could go to court for help. It is a clear tort. After all, they can file electronically and it's only a twenty-four hour round trip to the central courthouse computers. There's just a small problem: They are dying for lack of air right now.
Here's the solution: There isn't one. Not with our current expectations and society.
As with all problems where human beings are involved, this is going to have to evolve. The societal structures that have worked so well for us down here are going to have to change. That isn't to say that there won't be governments, charities and corporations.
More likely, we'll have to have a long and drawn out struggle between the varying imperatives: "It's mine!" "You can't do that to me!" "If you try to stop me I'll defend my rights!" "You must leave that alone!"
Hopefully not too many will die. Some will.
Who knows what will emerge? The governing-corporation? The feudal charity? Maybe the gift economy shown so beautifully in the Open Source Movement will be the governing paradigm? All I know is that our system isn't going to stay the same - because it cannot work when celestial mechanics becomes a part of your insurance quote.
Pimping my Karma Whore since 1847.
To Gregory W. Nemitz
Re: Amnesty for unauthorized use of service
I, Helios Apollo, owner of a main sequence, spectral class G2 star of radius 696,000 km, situated approximately 1.5e8 kilometers from the planet Earth and known in the English language as "the Sun", have been advised that you may have been using the service known as "Sunshine", a stream of photons emitted by the above-mentioned star, for the purposes of visual navigation. Since, according to my records, you are not a licensed user of the service, I am asking that you account for your usage of the service beginning from 0h00 UTC January 1, 2000 according to either of the following billing plans and remit any amounts that may be payable.
The Photon Count Plan. Count all photons emitted from the surface of the Sun of wavelength greater than 395 nanometers and less than 695 nanometers that directly impinge upon your person and all of your belongings including real estate, then multiply by the factor 4.0 times ten to the minus twenty-five to yield the amount in cents of U.S. currency.
The Earth Residency Plan. Only 36 cents per day of use. Use shall be deemed to occur in a 24 hour period if at least one photon would have been used under the Photon Count Plan.
To be exempted from accounting for use of the service, please submit a copy of Certificate of Vampire Status.
The only reason that's true is because everything on Earth has already been pointed at by someone who said "Mine !".
So, what EXACTLY are the intellectual challenges of refuse collection, to give one example.
Hmm... persuading someone else that it's worth doing?
...on January 27, 1967, when they nationalized 99.9* percent of everything. The UN Outer Space Treaty purports to make the entirety of outer space off limits to property, held in trust for "mankind". Supposedly, Earth is the single oasis of individual ownership in the vast communist deeps. Yes, I said communist, and I meant it! What else do you call banning all private ownership - of nearly everthing in existence? Besides pure bloody minded hubris.
This treaty is the dragon that the Eros Project is trying to slay. They are attempting to creeate case law backing the natural right to claim, take, and use unowned frontier land - even in space.
If you support private space ventures such as X-Prize, you should also support OrbDev.
Although, he may have a claim against Orbdev for selling him something they did not own {ever been to Paris and had someone try to sell you the Eiffel tower? Or been to London and had someone try to sell you Tower Bridge? Or } Well, you get the idea. And it's Orbdev that are going to be needing the lawyers, because fraud is criminal, not civil.
Je fume. Tu fumes. Nous fûmes!
Pointing doesn't give you property, but nor do physical markers, government laws, planetary authorizations, galactic leases or anything else.
Your property is what you can hold on to, and anything else is just hot air and handwaving.
Hot air and handwaving aren't necessarily worthless, because after all they reduce the pain and suffering in what we loosely call civilization, but to believe that rights have any fundamental substance is simply a delusion. The fact that those delusions are often imposed by force just proves the point.
It all boils down to what you can defend, and nothing more.
"The question of whether machines can think is no more interesting than [] whether submarines can swim" - Dijkstra
Think about what 'ownership of land' is really.
My first thought was 'well if he hasn't planted a flag there then how could he own it?'.
But that argument really doesn't stand the test of time. There are plenty of people that own land and property that they have never set foot on. Nothing strange about that.
So the moon is a tad farther away, and this asteroid a bit farther then that.
Distance isn't the problem.
The law isn't either.
It is enforceability and protection of said property.
A business owner who owns property on the other side of the country has many different tools protecting his ownership of the property. He has local, state and federal laws that specifically give him ownership, he can buy security service, he can hire people to protect his property, these are the ways that he takes ownership.
As long as his defenses are better then your offenses, as long as he wins the case of ownership and you loose then he owns the property.
And it isn't neccesarily laws that protect property ownership.
Take Saddam as an example. Saddam owned palaces all over Iraq. A year ago the owner of those palaces was not in question. You could try to lay claim to those palaces, but when Saddam was done with you, well lets just say you would apologize for your stupidity.
But now the US owns those palaces. We didn't go to court and prove anything.
We took them.
By force.
With big guns.
And in Iraq we are basicaly saying 'We don't need no stinking laws, if you think you own this property, then we challenge you to take it.'.
This has a bearing on this crackpot who sent Nasa a $20 parking ticket.
So dude has a peace of paper saying that he owns said asteroid. Isn't that nice.
Nasa dissagrees.
If dude can find a judge that will enforce his parking ticket against Nasa, then dude wins, ergo dude 'owns' the asteroid.
If dude cannot succesfully collect payment from Nasa then dude is left with one more option.
Eviction.
If dude can get the finances together, and the means, and the smarts to knock Nasa's probe off the asteroid then dude would truly own the asteroid.
But if dude cannot evict Nasa, and cannot enforce payment, then dude certainly doesn't own the asteroid.
This may all seem like the petty politics of a crackpot.
But China wants to put a man on the moon in the next 10 years.
The only thing stopping China from planting a Chinese flag and claiming the moon is a piece of paper that China may or may not have signed.
I'd prefer a system without the concept of money with people working because of the intellectual challenges, not because of the money, but I don't see a workable implementation of such a system in the near future, the problem is there will always be people too lazy to work if they won't get paid.
You hit the nail on the head. The problem with your Star Trek ideal is that the human species isn't particularly nice. We're lazy, vindictive, greedy, argumentative, teratorial etc etc.
About thirty years ago comprehensive education was introduced in to the country. Before then there were graded schools so that you went to a school (11 - 16 years old) dependent upon how you did in an exam taken in primary/grade school. In comprehensive education the idea was that you were only graded in your subjects and everyone went to the same school. The idea was that the clever and hardworking students would pull up those other. In reality the reverse happened and generally students were dragged down to the lower common denominator. Even they guy who invented the system admits it doesn't work. The problem was that the assumption was that everyone would want to do well and work, the reality is that everyone is lazy and wants as much as they can for as little as they can get away with.
The error in the thinking of mr. Nemitz seems to be typical for some legal "experts" in the US.
Less then a day ago we saw the story of a US company threatening an Italian Subject with the DMCA, those two claims have in common that these "experts" seem to lack the concept that there are areas where US law is NOT valid or applicable.
This is often called Imperialism and is generally frowned upon in civil societies.
In the case of Antarctica there is a (UN sponsored) treaty that allows states that are treaty members to use (as in loan) some areas in the Antarctic but they will not own it.
"The likes of Facebook and WhatsApp are free to those whose privacy is of zero value."
Gentlemen!
:)
;)
I bought one of those plots at $25 or whatever, as a gift for a girl I wanted to impress. I forgot from whom. Maybe moonplot.com or whatever. And it worked: she got her Certificate of Ownership or some such bumf, with her 'property' (in the 'Sea of Nonesuch' or whatever) marked on a separate chart. All nice with a seal and what have you. Worked, too: "Oh, you bought me a piece of the mooooooon! Wow! Sweeeeeeet!" etc. I'll spare you guys the details
All in all, a well-invested $25 in some cases. But don't plan on actually doing this on property investment grounds. You ARE buying stuff from snake oil salesmen -- just that this snake oil does work in some circumstances.
Note: this works because the moon has obvious romantic connotations (Lovers' Moon, Harvest Moon, 'over the moon', and so forth). I wouldn't plan on impressing someone by buying them a plot on Io. Unless you really have a very cool girlfriend. Or unless you are female, and you want to impress one of US.
And no, we're not still together
YM -- as with everything -- MV.
Cheers,
Nalfy
-- Despair is an operating system that ANY human being can run, sort of a psychological JAVA --
Ultimately ownership comes down to who has the bigger army.
If the head of the Mafia declared that he owned all of Chicago, and requested that everyone leave or be terrorized, the police would be dispatched. If the Mafia were sufficiently armed to hold off the police, then the military would be dispatched. In the USA it is a foregone conclusion that the military would win. Thus it is not disputed that US laws govern the territory called the USA. In the USA, citizens are allowed to own private property - in a democracy the citizens band together to fund said army for the common good (in theory).
The Poles probably had perfectly good property laws in the late 1930s - but it didn't due much to deter German trespassing. They didn't send in lawyers, they sent in tanks. Lawyers are only used by people who can't afford enough tanks to do the job (thankfully society has evolved to a point where this is usually the case).
Right now, if somebody could live independantly in space and laid claim to the Eros asteroid, nobody could do anything about it. Sure, somebody could file a claim in the UN, but nothing would stop you from just picking up the NASA probe and using it as scrap metal. No nation on Earth has a significant capability for prosecuting wars in space - yet.
I'm not saying this is how it should be - but this is how it always has been. The guy with the army makes the rules. Courts only have power because of the police. The UN only has power as long as its component nations are willing to supply troops. If you have a weak army, you had better make friends with somebody who has a strong army, and be prepared to pay for that friendship. If not, you won't be sovereign for long...
Our sun is already claimed...
So... Sol's owner should be hearing from
Japan regarding the solar flare damage his/her
star did to their satellites.
I believe I'll have a valid claim for
damage to my tinfoil hat.
Property rights and freedom go hand in hand. If you are "against" pritate ownership of property, you are against freedom. Do you not realize that in order to "eliminate" private property, you must do so by force? Or would you actually try to argue that force -- the basic premise of all theft, fraud, rape, and murder -- is a "lesser evil" than private ownership of property?
Moreover, when government owns all property, it is really those who control government who own the property. These are individuals just like you and me, acting in self-interest like you and me. The only difference is that they hold the "right" to invoke force as a means to an end, and we don't.
Also, if you do look at the cited documents on the lunatic's website, they're misaligned scans of court documents. But this isn't simple incompetence, it's encryption! "These document scans are formated to hinder text capture. No portion may be saved or copied for any purpose whatsoever."
"Do you have a flag? If you don't have a flag it's not yours."
This reminds me of that Eddie Izzard routine where the Europeans are seizing land from the Indians. After telling them repeatedly that they're not a nation and it's not their land unless they have a flag, the Indians go off and make themselves a flag. When they come back the English say... "Good - do you have a gun?" The Indians are... "Ooooh - you need a GUN and a flag." Sorry but this chap can wave around whatever bits of paper (and make as many flags) as he likes, but unless he has a 'gun' with which to threaten the government, it isn't going to work.
Of course, Terran property rights ultimately come down to who has the most guns too, but people forget that (unless they're Iraqi.)
Aide-toi, le Ciel t'aidera - Jeanne D'Arc.
There were communes in the 70s that used a bid system for jobs instead of money. The more bids, the less points. Everyone had to work to a certain number of points. All jobs were open to bidding. Cleaning paid high points, exercising horses paid really low. It actually worked pretty well when people didn't rig the bids (which of course people did).
And those lot of people are total idiots. You either have personal property rights, or you have the government exercising control of all the property.
The moment a government has the power to control the land you need for shelter, food and industry, that's the day that government can control every fundamental aspect of your life. They can tell you where to live, where to farm, where to work.
99.9% of the fools who argue against property rights are basically envious of some rich guy on the hill and either want him living in a trailer park out of spite, or they have some idiotic idea that with the government owning all the land, they'd be living in that house on the hill for free.
Sometimes I wish I could just send them all to a public housing project for six months.
You can tell a great deal about the character of a man by observing those who hate him.
Ask the native americans who owns the land. Once upon a time they would have laughed at the concept of owning the land. If you weren't there and using it then how could you deny it to anyone else and furthermore, what right did you have to spoil and damage it for your children. Now they understand too well what ownership means. It means that you will punish those who use something that you have told them not to.
This is often forgotten because we live in a world where we observe these 'laws' and they become our reality. The shifting of these concepts into a new frontier (asteroids) temporarily shows us the arbitrariness of it all. This will last until a property law adapts to cover space and we get used to it again, or until it collapses and we find a different way to orgainize ourselves out there.
The question of whether land claims in space are legal meaningless as far as moral rights go. Claim whatever you want. The correct question is who has the biggest 'guns' to control this space. You can bet new laws will be introduced to allow the government to parcel it out to those it favours, but these laws are in reality no more than threats from a government maintaining its power in a new frontier. That is why this man has no hope in hell of claiming an asteroid. The same goes for people who 'own' part of the moon. They have no 'guns' and thus no power to defend themselves. The government will say 'mine' and the laws are just its way of phrasing that.
Thing is, the US government doesn't have enough guns in the long run, no more than George III did some years ago with another colony. My advice is to get out there and start mining. Possession is nine-tenths of the law. The other tenth is possession.
Aide-toi, le Ciel t'aidera - Jeanne D'Arc.
Locke studied this kind of issue:
when can the commons be appropriated by a private individual?
(1) Individuals can appropriate common goods for their private use.
Reason: because of necessity. If a person is to survive, then by necessity he must take some of the commons for his own use (food, shelter etc).
(2) One justly appropriates common goods by virtue of laboring on them.
Reason: a person owns his own body and his own labor. When he applies this to a previously unowned thing (e.g. works a plot of land to create a harvest), his personal property interests are mixed with that thing and he can claim it as his own.
(3) There are limitations ot the right to acquire unkowned property: (a) you cannot acquire property that you have not worked with your labor, (b) you can only acquire so much as you can use without spoilage and (c) you must leave "as much and as good" as you take (e.g. the acquisition should not impoversh the commons). An example of C is that if there are many oases on a desert route, you can take one and improve it for your private use. However if there is only one, this must remain in the commons.
Locke goes on to point out that these limitations are somewhat ameliorated by the introduction of money. Because you can purchase the labor of others, thta labor becomes your labor, and you can use it to claim more from the commons than you can personally mix your labor with. Likewise, he asserts since you can covert resources into cash and cash is in essence unspoilable, you can acquire more of a resource than you can make personal use of. Finally, because people can purchase the use of things from you, it becomes possible to acquire the entire stock of a resource without making it impossible for other people to survive.
Locke then goes on to argue that people, by accepting the use of money, have accepted the consequences which include vastly unequal wealth and power. Once he gets to this point, he becomes more controversial. Locke was no socialist: he was an advocate of the pursuit of unlimited wealth and personal power, taken from the commons if necessary, even to the point of believing some human beings could own others. Yet even he would not say you could claim something without lifting a finger to do something with it.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
Ha! That just goes to show how much "Georges Clemenceau" knows about America! We had a period of civilization on August 14, 1927, between 3:00 PM and 4:30 PM.
I don't completly agree with Ayn Rand, but I think you are missing her point.
Ayn Rand based her system of rights on property rights explicity because she belived that without property rights, all other rights were meaningless. Of what use is freedom of speech if the government owns all the food? You own yourself, the governmnet does not own you, nor does anyone else. The government.. ie. force.. should only be used to prevent other people taking your property by force (theft) or guile (breach of contract).
Personally, I think Ayn Rand would be appaled by this fellow with the Asteroid. I doubt she would have been much impressed by someone pointing to a rock in the sky and saying 'Mine! Mine!'. Now, if someone manages to build a ship and land on an asteroid, I think that's a different story...
Jyth
If you're interested, here is a good intro to the philosophy of voluntary association. You are certainly not the only one who doesn't "get it" right off the bat. I didn't either.
Like all other visiting officials, NEAR and NASA can simply refuse to pay parking tickets under diplomatic immunity. It happens on Earth, why not the rest of the cosmos?
Man I wish Douglas Adams were with us to chime in here.
Anybody want a peanut?
"We are so very sorry for landing on your asteroid. We will gladly pay all rental fees & damages. A check will be delivered to you at said asteroid with the utmost urgency. We appreciate your patience.
Love,
NASA"
One could argue that the American Indians had no concept of land ownership, and that they didn't realize what it meant to buy and sell land.
Only if you know nothing about American Indians. Native Americans as a group actually exhibited highly sophisticated concepts of land ownership, including negotiating rights connected to the land (hunting, farming, etc.). Do you think it's a coincidence that so many towns in New England are "Springfield", or some other "...field"? The european settlers didn't come ashore to virgin wilderness. They came ashore and found thriving agricultural communities, towns and even cities.
Happily for those settlers, the germs they carried resulted in mortality rates of 95% or more in the native communities, which meant free farms, often already planted. Unhappily for us, that mortality rate and the european position on natives at the time means that we don't get to hear about the history of those groups before that time.
As for the Manhattan purchase, those who "bought" Manhattan actually bought hunting rights for one season from a group not local to Manhattan. When the actual residents objected to being moved out, and requested a hearing, most were killed. The Louisana purchase is similarly troubling, since the US apparently bought the territory of more than a hundred native nations from the French without consulting with any of the Indian nations involved. The fact that many of those nations had gone to all the trouble of sending ambassadors to europe was of little inconvenience to the US or the French.
This is not to present Indians as universally noble, many groups allied with european settlers to gain an advantage over competing groups, and were often quite brutal when they had the upper hand. Still other groups picked up the european habit of scalping with a vengance (used by europeans to establish headcounts for any of several bounties on indian lives).
But don't pretend that they didn't have sophisticated concepts of land ownership. They most definitely did. What they didn't have was resistance to european germs and the firearms and organization to balance the military might of the european settlers. During the US expansion to the west coast, the US signed literally hundreds of treaties with native american nations. And broke every single treaty. Every one. Since then, the US has done just a little better. After all, they still have the casinos...
Regards,
Ross
BTW: I have a friend a NASA that told me they turned the wheel all the way over to left, engaged the parking break and left the unit in GEAR!! Let's see them tow that!!
could someone in Nevada please go to the courthouse and get a copy of the complaint? It could really help those of us willing to take action to know what Mr. Nemitz specific claims are.... and the images on his website are not sufficient considering that the briefs are available to the public. Joe
If he is filing a claim in US Federal Court then he is asserting that the US has jurisdiction over the asteroid. If the US has jurisdiction over the asteroid then it must be part of the US. If it is part of the US then I believe the governement would have MANY means of claiming eminent domain, defined at that link:
Main Entry: eminent domain
Pronunciation: 'e-m&-n&nt- Function: noun
: the right of the government to take property from a private owner for public use by virtue of the superior dominion of its sovereignty over all lands within its jurisdiction
Come play Moral Decay!
Why do people in the Americas have property as we know it today? Go back 500 years. You have native American tribes that claim land and defend it against other tribes. Then you have the British, Spanish, French move in and either purchase the land from the tribes, or take it from them by force and then defend it from other invaders. (Mind you, I'm not saying what they did was right.) Then you have the future Americans get together and say 'piss off' to the British, and they defend the land against the British. Now we're at the point where the government owns anything within the perimeter they defend. The government and individuals then sell that land as they sees fit.
So a claim has never been about what you say. When there is no government, as is the case in space, it's all about what you buy from someone else or what you can take by force. In the end, it all comes down to force. So until this guy flies out there to Eros and starts fending off invaders, NASA or anyone else can park whatever it wants on Eros.
--
Luck is just skill you didn't know you had.
versus conventional property rights, NASA has the better claim since they are actually "using" the asteroid whereas Orbdev hasn't done anything but claim it.
Orbdev is based on the feudal property notion that simply riding around a piece of land for a day gives you some legitimate claim to it.
This is NOT a correct or workable concept of property.
Richard Steven Hack - This sig is TOO GODDAMN SHORT TO DO ANYTHING USEFUL WITH! MORONS!
I'm a lawyer (well I'm taking a business law class in college) so I think this really boils down to the difference btwn "probes" and "shells". Should it be determined by the courts that NASA is mainly in the business of firing shells at planets; ie: all Mars missions, then the offended party has a case, however, if it be determined by the courts that NASA is actually in the business of sending out "probes" then we have a real case on our hands. Should it be determined that NASA was not in the business of claiming the astroid, but rather trying to destroy the astertoid as prior conduct implies then the actionable party will prevail.