On Friday, May 30, 2003, at 01:46 PM, Major Variola (ret) wrote:
Barbra Streisand has filed a lawsuit against an amateur photographer, claiming he is violating her privacy by displaying a picture of her bluff-top Malibu estate on a Web site designed to document erosion and excessive development along California's 1,150-mile coastline.
The lawsuit filed in Superior Court in Santa Monica, besides seeking $10
million in damages, asks retired software engineer Kenneth Adelman to
remove the image of Streisand's mansion from the 12,000 photos he has
posted on http://www.californiacoastline.org. Adelman and his wife,
Gabrielle, have been snapping pictures for months from their helicopter
to show the splendors of the coastline and what they consider
environmental threats.
Adelman is a resident of the same small town I live in, Corralitos. He has gained a lot of justifiable fame for his clever idea of digitally photographing, with accurate GPS readings, the entire California coastline. One can imagine all sorts of uses, including doing image comparisons, calculations of rates of sand movement, vegetation changes (e.g., in sand dunes), and, of course, various kinds of economic development.
The second irony is that just today I took my first flying lesson, in a Diamond Katana composite/carbon single-prop plane. I took off from the Watsonville Airport, which is, I assume, the home airport of Adelman.
(I don't know if I'll continue all the way with flying, but I have a second lesson coming up in a few days.)
--Tim May
"Ben Franklin warned us that those who would trade liberty for a little bit of temporary security deserve neither. This is the path we are now racing down, with American flags fluttering."-- Tim May, on events following 9/11/2001
