Re: Constitutional Challenge to (C) Code

On Fri, 8 May 1998, Vance R. Koven <vrkoven[_at_]world.std.com> wrote:
>
> On Wed, 6 May 1998, Tim Phillips <phillips[_at_]mail.nhn.ou.edu> wrote:
> >
> > And it's positively funny to see the venerable medieval "three lives"
> > lease term trying to re-assert itself in this new context.
>
> Are you suggesting that the term extension violates the Rule Against
> Perpetuities?

I hadn't thought of that. My remark on the three-life leases was just an aside of the "my, my, what goes around, comes around" sort.

The reference was to leases such as that by Oswald, Bishop of Worcester, to Aelfild (A.D. 966) according to which the estate called Hindlip was given "sumum wife thaere is noma Aelfild... for uncre sibbe mid eallum thingum the thaerto belimpath freolice hiere daeg forgieaf and aefter hiere daege twam yrfeweardum and after heora forsithe to thaere halgan stowe into Wiogornaceastre... (to a certain woman whose name is Aelfhild... with everything belonging to it, for her lifetime, and after her death to two heirs, and after their death to the holy foundation at Worcester...)" [A.J. Robertson, Anglo-Saxon Charters, Cambridge U.P., 1956, #42.] I take "two heirs" to mean "two generations of heirs."

But that, as I said, was just an aside. More instructive is to compare and contrast the land enclosures of the 15th-19th centuries to the enclosure of the public domain and of the margins of fair use, through the GATT, the overturning of the La Ciniega decision, the expansive proposals of the administration's White Paper, and finally the copyright extension. The two phenomomena resemble one another insofar as old customary usages are being extinguished, and the common field itself is being fenced off, or having the way to it made more difficult (which makes it less usable even if the acreage is the same.) The modern copyright enclosures differ from the old land inclosures in that the land enclosures were part of the disintegration of the old feudal relationships, whereas the PD enclosures are part of a re-infeudation process whose object is to reduce us to intellectual vassalage to the copyright barons.

Tim Phillips
<phillips[_at_]mail.nhn.ou.edu> Received on Fri May 08 1998 - 18:24:36 GMT