Poor Mojo's Newswire

In his veto message issued Tuesday, the governor said that while he respected the measure's intent, he thinks Milk's "contributions should continue to be recognized at the local level."

Conservative groups had lobbied Schwarzenegger not to sign the legislation, sponsored by Assemblyman Mark Leno of San Francisco.

"If it rained tonight, it wouldn't wash off. It takes about two hours to dry and lasts three or four months," said Terlouw.

Terlouw is hired by real estate agents, but also by the city of Stockton when a foreclosure case becomes a code enforcement issue. He's worked for the city about a 100 times.

A police report filed about the incident said Michelle Allen allegedly chased children in her neighborhood while wearing the suit on Monday evening.

Allen also urinated on a neighbor's front porch, the report said, and was warned by officers to go home and stay there.

Allen was charged with disorderly conduct after an officer found her causing traffic problems on North Verity Parkway.

The officer's report stated that Allen was verbally abusive to him on the trip to jail and smelled of alcohol.

The report did not speculate as to why Allen was wearing the cow suit.

Imagine now that, for whatever reason, some academic stumbles across a copy of this issue in some library archive in 2105, and wants to reprint my article. She will of course need to secure the rights. Remember that copyright is no longer linked to year of publication - so to determine if the article is out of copyright, our academic will need to find the date of death of some anonymous reviewer in a tiny, defunct, decades-old magazine. If she's particularly savvy and interested, and has time and money, perhaps she'll ask the copyright office to run a search - which may or may not be definitive, since, as mentioned above, copyrights no longer need to be registered. Alternately, she may just reprint the piece, hoping that nobody will bother to sue her. But there's also a fairly decent chance that she'll just say "fuck it" and forget the whole thing. This is too bad for her, obviously, but it's also too bad for me, and for anyone who writes with the desire to have their work read by as wide an audience as possible. [Licensing this article under the Creative Commons license is meant to address some of these issues, at least as far as this particular article is concerned.] Works whose creators can't be found are sometimes known as "orphaned works." As copyright is extended, orphaned works by obscure or unfindable authors become more and more common. Already, films and comics from the '30s, '40s, and '50s are deteriorating beyond recovery because no one knows who has the right to restore and reprint them. This isn't intentional - it's a kind of accidental, bonus censorship. Indeed, it's so clearly pointless that Capitol Hill - prodded by public-domain advocate Lawrence Lessig - has actually shown some vague interest in fixing it.⁸