Eldred v. Ashcroft, 537 U. S. 186, was a decision by the Supreme Court of the United States upholding the constitutionality of the 1998 Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act. The practical result of this was to prevent a number of works from entering the public domain in 1998 and following years, as would have occurred under the Copyright Act of 1976. Materials which the plaintiffs had worked with and were ready to republish were now unavailable due to copyright restrictions. Internet publisher Eric Eldred was the lead petitioner, was joined by a group of commercial and non-commercial interests who relied on the public domain for their work and many amici including the Free Software Foundation, the American Association of Law Libraries, the Bureau of National Affairs, the College Art Association. Eldred was represented by a team at the Berkman Center for Internet and Society. Supporting the law were United States Attorneys General Janet Reno and John Ashcroft, along with a set of amici including the Motion Picture Association of America, the Recording Industry Association of America, ASCAP and Broadcast Music Incorporated.
The Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act extended existing copyright terms by an additional 20 years from the terms set by the Copyright Act of 1976. The law affected existing works. For works published before January 1, 1978 and still in copyright on October 27, 1998, the term was extended to 95 years. For works authored by individuals on or after January 1, 1978, the copyright term was extended to equal the life of the author plus 70 years. For works authored by joint authors, the copyright term was extended to the life of the last surviving author plus 70 years. In the case of works-for-hire, anonymous or pseudonymous works, the term was set at 95 years from the date of first publication, or 120 years from creation; the practical result of this was to prevent a number of works from entering the public domain in 1998 and following years, as would have occurred under the Copyright Law of 1976. Materials which the plaintiffs had worked with and were ready to republish were now unavailable due to copyright restrictions.
The lead petitioner, Eric Eldred, is an Internet publisher. Eldred was joined by a group of commercial and non-commercial interests who relied on the public domain for their work; these included a commercial publisher of paperback books. Supporting the law were the U. S. government, represented by the Attorney General in an ex officio capacity, along with a set of amici including the Motion Picture Association of America, the Recording Industry Association of America, ASCAP and Broadcast Music Incorporated. The original complaint was filed in the United States District Court for the District of Columbia on January 11, 1999; the plaintiffs' argument was threefold: That by retroactively extending copyright terms, Congress had violated the requirements of the Constitution's Copyright Clause, which gives Congress the following power: To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and DiscoveriesPlaintiffs argued that by reading this formulation so as to allow for any number of retroactive extensions, Congress could in practice guarantee an unlimited period of copyright protection, thus thwarting the intent of the clause.
That any copyright law must be subject to scrutiny under the First Amendment, thereby ensuring a balance between freedom of speech and the interests of copyright. That the doctrine of public trust requires the government to show a public benefit to any transfer of public property into private hands, that the CTEA violates this doctrine by withdrawing material from the public domain. In response, the government argued that Congress does indeed have the latitude to retroactively extend terms, so long as the individual extensions are for "limited times," as required by the Constitution; as an argument for this position, they referred to the Copyright Act of 1790, the first Federal copyright legislation, which applied Federal protection to existing works. Furthermore, they argued, neither the First Amendment nor the doctrine of public trust is applicable to copyright cases. On October 28, 1999, Judge June Green issued a brief opinion rejecting all three of the petitioners' arguments. On the first count, she wrote that Congress had the power to extend terms as it wished, as long as the terms themselves were of limited duration.
On the second count, she rejected the notion of First Amendment scrutiny in copyright cases, based on her interpretation of Harper and Row Publishers, Inc. v. Nation Enterprises, an earlier Supreme Court decision. On the third count, she rejected the notion that public trust doctrine was applicable to copyright law; the plaintiffs appealed the decision of the district court to the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, filing their initial brief on May 22, 2000, arguing the case on October 5 of the same year in front of a three-judge panel. Arguments were similar to those made in the district court, except for those regarding the public trust doctrine, which were not included in the appeal. Instead, the plaintiffs extended their argument on the copyright clause to note that the clause requires Congress to "promote the Progress of Science and
USS Deucalion was the third ship of the Amphion-class of repair ship built for the United States Navy by Tampa Shipbuilding Company during World War II. Named after Deucalion the mythological king of Thessaly, her keel was laid down on December 15, 1944, but her construction was canceled on August 12, 1945, shortly after the Atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Designed and built to carry out a primary mission of making emergency and routine repairs to ships of the fleet during periods of technical availability, Deucalion was to be equipped with a wide variety of repair shops: shipfitter, carpentry and copper, sheet metal, canvas, optical, foundry—in short, facilities that employed skilled artificers capable of repairing hardware from precision watches to heavy machinery and hulls. "These shops are limited in what they can do, only by the size of their equipment." Her modern engineering plant could generate enough electricity for not only herself but ships moored alongside undergoing repairs.
Her distilling plant could produce water for other vessels. Http://www.navsource.org/archives/09/25/2515.htm http://www.hazegray.org/danfs/auxil/ar15.htm http://www.destroyers.org/shiplist/ad-ar.htm
East Lawn Memorial Park is a cemetery in the western United States, located in East Sacramento, California. It is owned by East Lawn Memorial Parks & Mortuaries, which owns two other Sacramento area cemeteries. Founded in 1904, it is the resting place of several former Mayors of Sacramento as well as other public figures; the cemetery was founded in October 1904, in response to the Edwards Break Flood of 1904. The first burials took place on December 24th of that year. During the early 1900s the park was administered by the East Lawn Cemetery Association; the cemetery has a two-story mausoleum, completed in 1926, after several years of public opposition, led by a developer that had hoped to transition the memorial land into a residential zone. Despite the city council’s approval of the variance require to build the mausoleum, the developer put the issue on the upcoming election ballot. During the campaign, East Lawn made public statements that the families of those interred would not give their permission to move the remains of their loved ones beneath the ground of the cemetery.
In 2013 the park began to transition from vegetation to rock based gardens where appropriate to contend with seasonal drought conditions and water availability problems in northern California. In November of that year the cemetery had its one hundred thousandth interment; those interred in the cemetery include actor Neville Brand, professional baseball player James M. Grilk, composer Dick Jurgens, congressman Robert Matsui, actress Dorothy Millette Bern. Former Mayors of Sacramento buried here include William Land, Clinton White, Hiram Hendren, Joe Serna, William Curtis, Newton Earp; the cemetery holds public memorial events, such as a 2012 event memorializing the deaths of all indigents in the Sacramento area since its founding. Since 2003, the cemetery has dedicated memorials to those who have died in the region without a proper burial. Official website