“I’m not asking for money or a tax rebate….Just leave me alone.” is a post from Overlawyered - Chronicling the high cost of our legal system

Land use and real estate roundup is a post from Overlawyered - Chronicling the high cost of our legal system

Environment roundup is a post from Overlawyered - Chronicling the high cost of our legal system

Environment roundup is a post from Overlawyered - Chronicling the high cost of our legal system

To save historic California buildings… is a post from Overlawyered - Chronicling the high cost of our legal system

What had happened to the house in the meantime was what happens to any property tied up in litigation: it fell once more into a Dickensian state of ruin. As the suits dragged on, Uriah Levy’s old overseer, Joel Wheeler, “took care” of Monticello and sometimes lived in it. While he grew increasingly blind, paint peeled, glass broke, shutters and gutters disappeared, grime deepened, and the roof and terraces rotted. Wheeler dug up the lawn for a vegetable garden on one side and a pigpen on the other. Cattle wintered in the cellars, and Wheeler winnowed grain on the parlor’s parquet floor. On his watch, judged Wheeler’s successor, Thomas Rhodes, Monticello “was wantonly desecrated.”

Whole thing here.

Monticello’s brush with ruin-by-litigation is a post from Overlawyered - Chronicling the high cost of our legal system

Annals of costly historic preservation is a post from Overlawyered - Chronicling the high cost of our legal system

More: “Vancouver Banned Doorknobs. Good,” writes Colin Lecher at Popular Science. Because the less diversity and private choice and historical continuity, the better.

Vancouver bans doorknobs is a post from Overlawyered - Chronicling the high cost of our legal system

After landmarking inquiry, owner demolishes Wright interior is a post from Overlawyered - Chronicling the high cost of our legal system

…In Europe, sound recordings enter the public domain 50 years after their initial release. Once that happens, anyone can reissue them, which makes it easy for Europeans to purchase classic records of the past. In America, by contrast, sound recordings are “protected” by a prohibitive snarl of federal and state legislation whose effect was summed up in a report issued in 2010 by the National Recording Preservation Board of the Library of Congress: “The effective term of copyright protection for even the oldest U.S. recordings, dating from the late 19th century, will not end until the year 2067 at the earliest.… Thus, a published U.S. sound recording created in 1890 will not enter the public domain until 177 years after its creation, constituting a term of rights protection 82 years longer than that of all other forms of audio visual works made for hire.”

Among countless other undesirable things, this means that American record companies that aren’t interested in reissuing old records can stop anyone else from doing so, and can also stop libraries from making those same records readily accessible to scholars who want to use them for noncommercial purposes. Even worse, it means that American libraries cannot legally copy records made before 1972 to digital formats for the purpose of preservation—not unless those records have already deteriorated to the point where they may soon become unplayable.

That’s crazy.

Time to fix copyright on sound recordings is a post from Overlawyered - Chronicling the high cost of our legal system