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Court Takes Away Some of the Public Domain
An anonymous reader writes "In yet another bad ruling concerning copyright, a federal appeals court has overturned a lower court ruling, and said that it's okay for Congress retroactively to remove works from the public domain, even if publishers are already making use of those public-domain works. The lower court had said this was a First Amendment violation, but the appeals court said that if Congress felt taking away from the public domain was in its best interests, then there was no First Amendment violation at all. The ruling effectively says that Congress can violate the First Amendment, so long as it feels it has heard from enough people (in this case, RIAA and MPAA execs) to convince it that it needs to do what it has done." TechDirt notes that the case will almost certainly be appealed.
And the Supreme Whores keep on singing the same old song...
There's nothing wrong with "comparing things with other things of a much greater magnitude", it's only valid when you're talking about similar enough subjects. And unless you're suggesting that the books have sentience, or that the slaves do not, it's a horrible analogy.