Maine Voters Endorse Gay Rights Law
Kelly
Portland ME
Wednesday, November 9, 2005
Voters endorse gay rights law
By PAUL CARRIER,
Portland Press Herald Writer
Maine voters reversed themselves on a contentious issue Tuesday by
embracing the state's new anti-discrimination law, giving supporters of
gay rights a convincing referendum win after two previous losses.
With 75 percent of Maine's 634 precincts reporting, unofficial returns
showed Question 1, which would have repealed the law, going down to
defeat, 56 percent to 44 percent. That means the law, which bans
discrimination based on sexual orientation, takes effect immediately,
making Maine the sixth and final state in New England to put such a law
on the books.
"After 28 years, it's over, you guys. We won," Pat Peard, a longtime
champion of gay rights, told supporters in Portland at 11 p.m. She was
referring to the initial introduction of a gay rights bill in the
Legislature in the 1970s, launching a struggle that has continued ever
since.
The vote reversed a trend that dates back to 1998, when voters narrowly
rejected a gay rights law in a special election. Voters again opposed a
gay rights law in a follow-up referendum two years later.
Tuesday's referendum was held because opponents of the law used the
so-called "people's veto" provision in the state Constitution to give
voters a chance to repeal the law.
Both camps seemed to anticipate the outcome within two hours of the
polls closing. By 10 p.m., a festive atmosphere prevailed at the Holiday
Inn by the Bay in Portland, where hundreds of supporters gathered to
celebrate.
"It's a much-needed win for our national communities," said Matt
Foreman, executive director of the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force,
who was in Portland on Tuesday night. "Winning here shows that, through
real dogged grassroots work, we can overcome the lies and distortions of
our opponents."
"I think it's time now that we put the campaign behind us, think of
Maine's future and get all of us to work together," said Gov. John
Baldacci, who proposed the gay rights law to the Legislature earlier
this year.
The mood was more somber at the Senator Inn in Augusta, where about 50
opponents of the law listened quietly as the returns trickled in. But
Paul Madore of the Maine Grassroots Coalition continued to talk tough as
the night wore on, saying the book will never close on what he called
"the moral debate" over gay rights because "it's too important a law to
let go."
Madore did not elaborate on the next step, but opponents of the law plan
to hold a news conference in Augusta today.
The referendum was the biggest draw and the most contentious issue on
the seven-question ballot, which featured no races for the Legislature,
the Blaine House or Congress. Still, the off-year battle over gay rights
was a relatively low-key campaign that concentrated on grassroots
politics and get-out-the-vote efforts rather than a heavy advertising
blitz.
The thinking was that there were few undecided voters, so it made more
sense for each side to mobilize its base than to try to sway the few who
had not made up their minds.
As Melody Clifton of Windham said Tuesday when she voted for repeal at
Windham High School: "Most people have their minds made up when they
come in here."
Marvin Druker, a political scientist at Lewiston-Auburn College,
speculated that the law's supporters may have "learned their lesson"
this time around, "sticking to business, finding out who their voters
were and getting them out to vote."
Druker also said society has become more accepting of gays and lesbians,
that the law had prominent mainstream supporters and that Mainers
alleging they have been discriminated against came forward to tell their
stories.
The law prohibits discrimination based on sexual orientation in
employment, housing, public accommodations, credit and education. It
defines sexual orientation as "a person's actual or perceived
heterosexuality, bisexuality, homosexuality or gender identity or
expression."
The law says it is not intended to redefine marriage, which a separate
state law defines as the union of a man and a woman. But opponents of
the law, led by the Christian Civic League of Maine and the Maine
Grassroots Coalition, argued during the campaign that keeping the gay
rights law on the books would pave the way for legalizing same-sex
marriage.
Maine Won't Discriminate, which led the fight to retain the law,
countered that the law had nothing to do with marriage.
Supporters said discrimination against gays and lesbians is a fact of
life in Maine, so the Legislature did the right thing by amending the
Human Rights Act to ban such practices.
Voters who backed the law said they did so because discrimination is
wrong, regardless of the basis for it. "People have the right to be who
they are" without worrying about losing a job or an apartment as a
result, said singer Kattie Webber of Farmingdale.
Jeanne Christie, who moved from the Washington, D.C., area to Windham
three years ago, said the gay rights law reflected a strong Maine value
that is attractive to newcomers like her.
"As people from away, that is one of the things that is important to us
about Maine, that people are tolerant," she said.
Some voters who backed repeal Tuesday made no mention of the
marriage-is-next argument as they left polling places in Augusta and
Farmingdale, but Clifton said the possibility of same-sex marriage
played a role in her vote to repeal.
"I genuinely feel that we should not give anyone special rights," said
George Jablon of Augusta, who is retired. "We built the greatest nation
in the world on biblical principles, and now we've abandoned that."
Pat Shaw of Farmingdale, a retiree who voted to repeal the law, said
supporters of gay rights should have dropped the issue after Mainers
twice rejected such laws in previous campaigns. "It's an old issue and
they're just beating it to death," Shaw said.
The referendum campaign effectively began when the Legislature passed
Baldacci's gay rights bill March 30. He signed the bill into law the
next day, and opponents quickly began circulating petitions to force a
repeal referendum, or "people's veto."
The law's supporters raised and spent much more money than the law's
detractors.
Four political action committees that urged voters to keep the law had
raised almost $930,000 by late last month, compared with less than
$336,000 in receipts for two PACs that opposed the gay rights law. Both
sides continued to raise and spend money in the waning days of the
campaign.
- Staff Writer Trevor Maxwell
contributed to this report.
Staff Writer Paul Carrier can be contacted at 622-7511 or at:
pcar...@pressherald.com
<A
HREF="http://pressherald.mainetoday.com/news/state/051109question1.shtml">http://pressherald.mainetoday.com/news/state/051109question1.shtml</A>
jake
SIX-PACK
......you make my dreams come true!
THE FLAMING HOMO
YOU'RE A HYPOCRITE ... I post articles too that uses the same sources
as Kelly AND so do thousands if not millions in usenet groups and
discussion groups on the internet.
While it is not stated as such, the law usually implies to those who
want to make a profit by posting copyrighted material somewhere else.
The posts that Kelly and myself post are not meant for profit but to
educate and for means of discussion.
Joey posted a few articles too over the last few days on computers. Why
didn't you attack him or myself as well? Because you want to play the
act of revenge against Kelly.
People discuss news events in these groups ... that's why they are
called news groups and that's why people post news articles.
This is one of the few occasions where I will speak to you directly and
break my rule of ignoring you. Don't get used to it unless you can post
here in harmony and accordingly.
I don't care if you post here Jake but I do care when you disrupt this
group.
There comes a point where it becomes OVERKILL. If you like reruns so
much, I suggest several venues .... there's TVLAND, Nick At Nite and
even TBS. If you like to stay current, I suggest you join the human
race and stop being such a nag and a Yenta.
jake wrote:
> ....this header thread reeks of "copyright infringement," at least, it
> so appears to moi.
>
> Let's regroup here....you HAVE to be a registered member to even access
> this news feed.
>
> Hmmmmmmmm!
>
> Would that indicate that it is NOT public domain and covered under
> Federal and International Copyright Law????
>
> Hmmmmmmmm????
>
> Would that indicate that Kelly has free reign to electronically copy it
> verbatim and redistribute in as he has????
>
> A membership is required to view this article, yet Kelly has the legal
> authority to reproduce it electronically for the world to view?????
>
> Hmmmmmmm!!!!
>
> My, Kelly does possess the long arm of the law, eeeeeh?
>
> jake
>
>
> mojo
> SIX-PACK_
> ......you make my dreams come true![img]
jake
KELLY is the HYPOCRITE.
COPYRIGHT
A copyright is a form of intellectual property that grants its holder
the legal right to restrict the copying and use of an original, creative
expression, such as a literary work, movie, musical work or sound
recording, painting, computer program, or industrial design for a
defined period of time.
The rights enforceable under copyright protection cover the use only of
intangible creations—the story told within a book is protected
from misuse as opposed to the printed copy itself, or the form of a
sculpture as opposed to the actual carved rock. Copyrights do not
protect ideas, however, which are the domain of patents (if at all), but
only the particular expression of an idea. A copyright on the cartoon
character Mickey Mouse, for example, would not prevent others from
creating talking mice, but only from too closely copying the character
and traits of that talking mouse in particular. Copyrights function
similarly to patents, in that both grant exclusive rights over their
respective subject matter that are enforceable against everyone (with
some exceptions, discussed below). This is in contrast to trademark
protection, which is almost always only enforceable against competitors
in the same product market, and only against certain limited commercial
uses. Also in contrast to trademarks, copyright (and patent) protection
is set for a limited, statutorily-defined number of years, during which
the copyright owner does not actually have to make use of his work in
order to keep others from doing so. After the term is up, the
copyrighted work enters the public domain and is available for anyone to
freely use as courts in the United States and the United Kingdom have
rejected the doctrine of a common law copyright. [Top]
BACKGROUND
[Top]
RIGHTS OF COPYRIGHT HOLDER
A copyright holder typically has exclusive rights: to make and sell
copies of the work (including, typically, electronic copies)
to import or export the work
to make derivative works
to publicly perform the work
to sell or assign these rights to others What is meant by the phrase
"exclusive right" is that the copyright holder and only the copyright
holder is allowed to do these things; everyone else is prohibited from
doing them without the copyright holder's consent. Copyright is often
called a "negative right", to stress that it has less to do with
permitting people (e.g. authors) to do anything, and more to do with
prohibiting people (e.g. readers, viewers, or listeners) from doing
something: reproducing the copyrighted work. In this way it is similar
to the Unregistered Design Right in English Law and European Law.
United States Constitution, Article I, Section 8, Clause 8: "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 Discoveries;" Copyright is this protection of "Progress of
Science" (patents cover the "useful Arts"). [Top]
TRANSFER OF RIGHTS
Copyrights may be granted, sold, or relinquished. Very often, a
copyright holder will, by contract, transfer his copyrights to a
corporation. For example, a musician who records an album will sign an
agreement with a record company in which the musician agrees to transfer
all copyrights in the recordings to the company in exchange for
royalties and other terms. One might ask why a copyright holder would
ever give up his rights. The answer is that large companies generally
have production and marketing capabilities far beyond that of the
author. In the digital age of music, music may be copied and distributed
for a minimal cost through the Internet, but record labels attempt to
provide the service of promoting and marketing the artist so that the
work can reach a much larger audience. A copyright holder does not have
to transfer all rights completely. Some of the rights may be
transferred, or else the copyright holder may grant another party a
non-exclusive license to copy and/or distribute the work in a particular
region.
[Top]
IDEA-EXPRESSION DICHOTOMY AND THE MERGER DOCTRINE Main article:
Idea-expression divide
Copyright covers the expression of an idea, not the idea itself —
this is called the idea-expression divide. For example, if a book is
written describing a new way to organize books in a library, a reader
can freely use that method without being sued and can describe it to
others; it is only the particular way in which the original author
described that process that is protected by copyright. One might be able
to obtain a patent for the method, but that is a different subject.
Compilations of facts or data may be copyrighted if the facts are
selected and arranged in an original manner, though protection will only
apply to wholesale copying of that selection and arrangement and not to
the facts themselves.
In some cases, ideas may only be capable of intelligible expression in
only one or a limited number of ways. Therefore even the expression in
these circumstances is unprotected, or extremely limited to verbatim
copying only. In the United States this is known as the merger doctrine,
because the expression is considered to be inextricably merged with the
idea. Merger is often pleaded as an affirmative defense to infringement,
though some believe that it should prevent the material at issue from
being copyrighted in the first place.
[Top]
THE FIRST-SALE DOCTRINE
Main article: first-sale doctrine
Note that copyright law does not restrict resale of copies of works,
provided those copies were made by or with the permission of the
copyright holder. Thus it is legal, for example, to resell a book or a
CD that you have purchased, provided you do not keep a copy for
yourself. In the United States this is known as the first-sale doctrine,
and was established in the U.S. court system to clarify the legality of
reselling books in used book stores. Elsewhere it has other names; in
the United Kingdom it is known as "exhaustion of rights" and is a
principle which applies to other intellectual property rights. Subject
to moral rights, copyright also does not prohibit the owner of a
physical copy of a work from modifying, defacing, destroying, etc. the
work, so long as this does not involve duplication. [Top]
FAIR USE AND FAIR DEALING
Main articles: fair use and fair dealing. Copyright also does not
prohibit all forms of copying. In the United States, the fair use
doctrine, codified as 17 U.S.C. Section 107, allows copying and
distribution. The statute does not clearly define fair use, but rather
gives four non-exclusive factors to consider in a fair use analysis. In
Canada, the United Kingdom, and other former countries in the British
Empire, a similar notion of fair dealing exists. Built by judicial
precedent it tends to be quite ill defined. [Top]
STATUTORY AND COMPULSORY LICENSES
Some jurisdictions may provide that certain classes of copyrighted works
(for example, musical works in the United States) are available under a
statutory license. This is also called a compulsory license, because
under this scheme, anyone who wishes to copy a covered work does not
need the permission of the copyright owner, but instead merely files the
proper notice and pays a set fee established by statute (or by agency
decision under statutory guidance) for every copy made. Failure to
follow the proper procedures would then result in the copyist being
vulnerable to an infringement suit. Because of the difficulty of
following this process for every individual work, copyright collectives
and performing rights organisations (such as ASCAP, BMI, RIAA and MPAA)
have been formed to sell the rights to hundreds of works at once. Though
this market solution bypasses the statutory license, the availability of
the statutory fee still helps dictate the price per work that collective
rights organizations charge, driving it down to what the avoidance of
procedural hassle would justify.
[Top]
HOW COPYRIGHTS ARE OBTAINED AND ENFORCED Typically, works must meet
minimal standards of originality in order to qualify for a copyright,
and the copyright expires after a set period of time. Different
countries impose different tests, although generally the test is low; in
the United Kingdom there has to be some 'skill, originality and work'
which has gone into it. However, even fairly trivial amounts of these
qualities are sufficient. In the United States, the original owner of
the copyright may be the employer of the actual author rather than the
author himself if the work is a "work for hire". Again, this principle
is widespread; in English Law the Copyright Designs and Patents 1988
provides that where a work in which copyright subsists is made by an
employee in the course of that employment, the copyright is
automatically assigned to the employer. Copyrights are generally
enforced by the owner in a civil law court, but there are also criminal
infringement statutes. Criminal sanctions are generally aimed at serious
counterfeiting activity, but might become more commonplace nowadays as
the copyright collectives like the RIAA are more and more targetting the
file sharing home Internet user. Up until now, these cases are usually
settled outside of court though, demanding a payment of several thousand
dollars with a mere threat to sue the sharing person, so not even making
it to civil law courts in reality. [Top]
COPYRIGHT NOTICES
In general when a work such as a book or movie is registered with the
appropriate country's copyright office, the material at the beginning or
end may contain a copyright notice which can be a c inside a circle
©, or the word "copyright", followed by the year(s) of the
copyright and the copyright owner's name. This functions to inform any
potential users that the work is protected from copying. Notice is not
required for the work to be legally protected in nations that have
acceded to the Berne Convention, which did away with such formalities.
Under nearly any modern copyright régime, a work is generally
protected by copyright from the moment of its creation whether it
displays a notice or not. However, the presence of a notice may make it
easier to claim certain damages in infringement lawsuits, because of the
presumption notice may bring that a defendant's infringement was
intentional.
The symbol, ©, is Unicode symbol 00A9 in hexadecimal, and can be
entered into (X)HTML as © or ©. [Top]
YEAR(S) OF COPYRIGHT
The year(s) of copyright are listed after the © symbol. If the work
has been modified (i.e., a new edition) and recopyrighted, there will be
more than one year listed.
[Top]
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED
The phrase, All rights reserved, is a formal notice that all rights
granted under existing copyright law are retained by the copyright
holder and that legal action may be taken against copyright
infringement. Two countries require this text for a copyright notice to
be valid, so it is normal to see it even when a work is in fact being
made available for copying.
[Top]
COPYRIGHTING FONTS
In the United States, typeface designs are not copyrightable, but may be
patentable if novel enough.
In Europe, Germany (in 1981) and the UK (in 1989) have passed laws
making typeface designs copyrightable. The UK law is even retroactive,
so designs produced before 1989 are also copyrighted, if the copyrights
wouldn't have already expired (the German one is not retroactive). [Top]
RIGHTS BEYOND COPYRIGHT
Many European countries (and other countries as a result of the GATT
Trade Related Intellectual Property or "TRIPs" agreement) further
provide for moral rights in addition to copyrights possessed by authors,
such as the right to have their work acknowledged and not be disparaged.
(Famously, the Monty Python comedy troupe managed to use these rights to
sue American TV network ABC for airing re-edited versions of Monty
Python's Flying Circus.)
While copyright is normally assigned or licensed to the publisher,
authors generally retain their moral rights (although in some
jurisdictions these can be excluded under contract). In most of Europe
it is not possible for authors to assign their moral rights (unlike the
copyright itself, which is regarded as an item of property which can be
sold, licensed, lent, mortgaged or given like any other property). They
can agree not to enforce them (and such terms are very common in
contracts in Europe). There may also be a requirement for the author to
'assert' these moral rights before they can be enforced. In many books,
for example, this is done on a page near the beginning, in amongst the
British Library/Library of Congress data. Some European countries also
provide for artist resale rights, which mean that artists are entitled
to a portion of the appreciation of the value of their work each time it
is sold. These rights are granted on the background of a different
tradition, which granted droits d'auteur rather than copyright, also
granting all creators various moral rights beyond the economic rights
recognized in most copyright jurisdictions. (see also parallel
importation.)
[Top]
HISTORY OF COPYRIGHT
Main article: History of copyright
While governments had previously granted monopoly rights to publishers
to sell printed works, the modern concept of copyright originated in
1710 with the British Statute of Anne. This statute first recognized
that authors, rather than publishers, should be the primary beneficiary
of such laws, and it included protections for consumers of printed work
ensuring that publishers could not control their use after sale. It also
limited the duration of such exclusive rights to 28 years, after which
all works would pass into the public domain. The Berne Convention of
1886 first established the recognition of copyrights between sovereign
nations. (Copyrights were also provided by the Universal Copyright
Convention of 1952, but that convention is today largely of historical
interest.) Under the Berne convention, copyright is granted
automatically to creative works; an author does not have to "register"
or "apply for" a copyright. As soon as the work is "fixed", that is,
written or recorded on some physical medium, its author is automatically
granted all exclusive rights to the work and any derivative works unless
and until the author explicitly disclaims them, or until the copyright
expires.
[Top]
CRITIQUE OF COPYRIGHT
Critiques of copyright as a whole fall broadly into two camps, asserting
that the very concept of copyright has never been of net benefit to
society, and has always served simply to enrich a few at the expense of
creativity, or asserting that the current copyright system doesn't work
in the new Information society. The general problem is that the current
(international) copyright system undermines its own goal (Boyle 1996,
142). The concept of public domain, needed as a pool for future
creators, is gradually being eroded, as copyright terms are extended to
last beyond the lifetime of the audience which experienced and knows of
the original work.
Other copyright scholars believe that irrespective of contemporary
advances in technology, copyright remains the fundamental way by which
authors, sculptors, artists, musicians and others can fund the creation
of new works, and that absent legal protection, many valuable books and
art would not be created. This interest is arguably served even by
repeated extension of copyright terms to encompass multiple generations
beyond the author's life, not only because many "authors" and copyright
holders are corporations, but also because the ability of an author's
heirs to continue to profit from a protected work may provide a
substantial part of the incentive to create. The ease of copying digital
materials and the apparent lack of severe consequences for either the
producers or the reusers, has been gradually eroding the belief that
copyright as presently constructed is indispensable. It can be argued
that, rather than criminalise the many millions of file sharers around
the world who now routinely use the internet to breach copyright
(because copyright laws have proven unenforcible), copyright holders use
the legal system to apply extortion by charging for products that are
readily available for free. Bill Gates is on record as saying that there
is no way technically of preventing copyrighted digital material being
replicated, so it is likely in future that attempts to protect
copyrighted works will become uneconomic, as well as unpopular
politically. Open source software and projects like BambooWeb have
demonstrated that even in the absence of copyright-enforced monopoly
rents, quality works can be created. Some online authors, such as Cory
Doctorow, retain the copyright to their work but license it for free
distribution (for example under a Creative Commons License). This has
the benefit of allowing the author to loosen some of the restrictions
that copyright imposes while retaining control over other aspects of the
work.
Copyright can also be used to stifle political criticism. For example,
in the US the contents of talk shows and similar programs are protected
by copyright. NBC's Meet the Press. Although the fair use provisions may
apply in such cases, the risks and the pressure from insurance companies
usually prevents the use of materials without permission. In the US in
2003, controversial changes implemented by the Sonny Bono Copyright Term
Extension Act extending the length of copyright under U.S. copyright law
by 20 years were constitutionally challenged unsuccessfully in the
Supreme Court. The Court, in the case called Eldred v. Ashcroft, held
inter alia that in placing existing and future copyrights in parity in
the CTEA, Congress acted within its authority and did not transgress
constitutional limitations. [Top]
UNUSUAL COPYRIGHT GRANTS
On rare occasions, rights can be granted outside of usual legislation.
When the current UK copyright legislation was debated in parliament,
former Prime Minister Lord Callaghan successfully proposed an amendment
allowing the Great Ormond Street Hospital for Sick Children to retain
indefinitely the rights to payments of royalties for performances of
Peter Pan. This allowance can be seen explicitly written into of the
Act.
[Top]
RELATED TOPICS
[Top]
NATIONAL COPYRIGHT LAWS
United States copyright law
Japan copyright law
Australian copyright law
Copyright law of the European Union
Copyright law of the United Kingdom
Hong Kong copyright law
Canadian copyright law
[Top]
INTERNATIONAL TREATIES CONCERNING COPYRIGHT Berne Convention for the
Protection of Literary and Artistic Works of 1886
Universal Copyright Convention of 1952
The WTO Agreement on Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property
Rights (TRIPS), of 1994
WIPO Copyright Treaty of 1996
WIPO Performances and Phonograms Treaty of 1996 [Top]
ADVOCATES OF COPYRIGHT LAW REFORM
Mary Bono
Robin Gross
Lawrence Lessig
Eben Moglen
Richard Stallman
Jack Valenti
[Top]
SEE ALSO
anti-copyright
CONTU (The National Commission on New Technological Uses of Copyright
Works)
copyleft
copynorm
copyright education
copyright-free
Copyright infringement of software
Creative Commons
crypto-anarchism
Digital Millennium Copyright Act
Digital rights management
Eldred vs Ashcroft
Fair use
Fair dealing
Free Culture
List of leading legal cases in copyright law List of countries'
copyright length
Permission culture
philosophy of copyright
Reproduction fees
software copyright
Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act
Trademark
The Uneasy Case for Copyright
United States copyright law
[Top]
FURTHER READING
Bruce Lehman: Intellectual Property and the National Information
Infrastructure (Report of the Working Group on Intellectual Property
Rights, 1995)
[Top]
View Live Article This article is from Wikipedia. All text is
available under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License
Unnamed_...@webtv.net
Body Glove
jake
SIX-PACK