On Wednesday, January 22, 2003, at 03:16 PM, Michael Shields wrote:
They can simply say that works copied or bought or otherwise acquired during this period must be destroyed.In article <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>, Marc de Piolenc <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:The US Constitution prohibits ex post facto laws.It seems to me that works could be removed from the public domain without passing an ex post facto law, as long as this hypothetical law did not affect works created or copies made during the period between the expiration of the copyrights and the law's passing. -- Shields.
This is essentially how they (the statists, of course) claim that new laws restricting guns which may be owned or requiring registration and fee payments are not "technically" ex post facto laws.
"We are not saying that your purchase and/or ownership of that rifle was a criminal act during the period covered. Rather, we are saying that you have until the end of this year to destroy it, move it out of state, and so on. And if you don't, that legally-purchased item will then be contraband and you'll face a mandatory 8-year sentence for owning it."
(Which gets very interesting when some of us don't even remember what we have! Or where we stored things. The law is an ass.)
(Note that some have refused to register their weapons on Fifth Amendment grounds: registering or reporting a weapon they are forbidden to have is self-incriminating. There are supposedly some court rulings exempting convicted felons from gun registration requirements for exactly this reason. The law is an ass.)
--Tim May
