On Tue, Jan 18, 2011 at 08:15:18PM -0500, Christine Nielsen wrote: > ... pardon me for butting into other peoples' business, but I believe > it was Ann who was asking for information...
Yep - Paul just corrected me on that. But, as an aside, advice from lawyers (and even watching court cases) often gives you a false impression. The answer you get may very well be correct, but it often depends on a particular technicality, and isn't useful in the general case. There are, unfortunately, countless cases that seem to be based on the belief that just because you can be sued (and/or arrested) for something, that activity must have been illegal. And, in fact, at some level it may be - there are laws on the books that suggest refusing to obey an illegal order from a law officer is in itself an offence. (We've got one here in San Jose, for example, that police use to justify heavy-handed action against the public). In fact most arrests for offences like that never come to court; the individual is released with no charges being filed. And if a case does go to trial initial judgement can go against you; a court case just determines if the action in question does in fact contravene the law being quoted. You need to go to appeal (and, quite possibly, all the way up to the supreme court) to get a conviction based on such a law overturned on constitutional grounds. Eventually somebody probably will push a "public photography" case that far. Until that happens, though, we're stuck with the current mess. -- PDML Pentax-Discuss Mail List [email protected] http://pdml.net/mailman/listinfo/pdml_pdml.net to UNSUBSCRIBE from the PDML, please visit the link directly above and follow the directions.
