The story, laid out in court records, reads like a small-town soap opera, with a judge driven by personal conflicts playing the main character. . .
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Citizens, Sheriff Force County Judge To Withdraw Unconstitutional Order Forbidding Filming In Front Of The Courthouse
from the not-how-the-law-works dept
Judges have plenty of power, especially local judges who can run their jurisdiction as they see fit without fearing too much pushback from higher courts, residents, or area law enforcement.
Judge Steven Privette is the presiding circuit court judge in Howell County, Missouri, home to around 40,000 Missouri residents. Privette is currently facing some controversy of his own making by refusing to recuse himself from a case involving one of his wife’s political opponents.
Here’s the background on that case, as recounted by Tony Messenger for the St. Louis Post-Dispatch:
The appeals court last week issued a “stop order” to Privette, barring him from taking any action in a contempt of court case he filed against Oregon County Circuit Clerk Betty Grooms. The story, laid out in court records, reads like a small-town soap opera, with a judge driven by personal conflicts playing the main character.
The story starts in November 2018, when Grooms, a Republican, won the race for circuit clerk over Alice Bell, a Democrat. Bell was a deputy clerk in the office and continued to work there after she lost the election. Three years later, in November 2021, Bell married Privette, the presiding judge of the 37th Judicial Circuit, which covers Howell, Oregon, Shannon and Carter counties. Privette, a Republican, was first appointed a judge by Gov. Mike Parson in 2018.
Circuit clerks and judges tend to work closely together. Last December, Bell was scheduled to be the court clerk in a civil case in Privette’s courtroom. Because the clerk and judge are married, officials from the Office of Supreme Court Administrator advised Grooms that she should replace Bell on that case with another deputy clerk.
When Grooms tried to do so, Privette said in open court that “he would have the sheriff remove Betty from the courtroom if she insisted on replacing Alice Bell as his courtroom clerk in that pending civil case,” according to court records.
So Grooms stood down.
So, that’s how Privette runs his courthouse. And this is how Privette runs the streets. Judge Privette issued an order, in May of this year, forbidding residents from filming people on the public sidewalk outside of the Howell County courthouse. Since then, citizens have protested the order by violating the order, gathering in groups to film outside of the courthouse.
Obviously, the judge’s order violates the First Amendment. But it is his order and, up until recently, he had law enforcement’s cooperation.
The First Amendment advocates were told by Howell County sheriff’s deputies that if they didn’t stop recording, they’d be hauled before Privette on contempt charges.
“You can’t do that,” said Randle Daily, who posts videos on YouTube under the name Show Me State News. “If we’re on a public sidewalk, that’s our First Amendment right.”
Shortly after Johnson arrived, Daily and another person were handcuffed and taken into court. She was dumbfounded.
“The whole thing was bizarre,” Johnson says. “This can’t actually be happening in 2022.”
Judge Privette didn’t care that his order violated the Constitution. Instead, according to an audio recording of court proceedings, he doubled down, insisting any filming of the public sidewalk, no matter how far away, would violate his order.
“You could use a telescope and take (photos or videos) from a mile away and you would be in contempt of this court’s order,” the judge said, according to audio posted to YouTube.
With the judge unwilling to listen to reason or recognize rights, residents approached Sheriff Brent Campbell. After making their case and requesting public records related to the enforcement of this clearly unlawful order, the Sheriff took matters into his own hands. And that appears to have forced the judge’s hand. . ."
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Daily Deal: Microsoft Surface Pro 3 (Refurbished)
from the good-deals-on-cool-stuff dept
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Filed Under: daily deal
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Elon Musk Remains Exactly Correct About Patents: They’re For The Weak
from the competition-guides-innovation dept
"While we’ve been criticizing some of Elon Musk’s actions and statements lately, we still stand by what we’ve said for years: that his view on patents is entirely, unquestionably, correct. In 2014, he pledged to open up all of Tesla’s patents. And when some investors insisted he didn’t really mean it, he clarified that he absolutely mean that anyone should just use anything they find in Tesla’s patents.
Musk: We actually don’t require any formal discussions. So they can just go ahead and use them.
Reporter: Is there a licensing process?
Musk: No. You just use them. Which I think is better because then we don’t need to get into any kind of discussions or whatever. So we don’t know. I think you’ll see it in the cars that come out, should they choose to use them.
There was a funny flurry of articles pointing out that this wasn’t an altruistic move, that it actually benefited Tesla, but, uh, yeah, that’s the point.
It’s good to see that Musk is still standing by that view, and not just for Tesla, but for SpaceX as well. Jay Leno just took a tour of SpaceX’s “Starbase” facility in Texas with Musk for Leno’s TV show, and they had a brief discussion on patents, where Musk made it clear that patents are stupid.
During the tour, Leno asked if SpaceX had a patent on the material used to build its ships. Musk replied that his spacecraft manufacturer ”[doesn’t] really patent things.”
“I don’t care about patents,” Musk told Leno. “Patents are for the weak.”
In Musk’s opinion, patents are “generally used as a blocking technique” that are designed to prevent others from innovating.
“They’re used like landmines in warfare,” he says. “They don’t actually help advance things; they just stop others from following you.”
You can see that brief bit of the segment in the video with this tweet:
It’s good to see him still making this point. As we’ve discussed for years, innovation leaders rarely actually need the patents other than to try to pull up the ladder behind them and stop competition. But history has shown that the way that new markets advance is when there are multiple competitors pushing each other to innovate. We’re finally seeing that with electric vehicles, and perhaps a bit with private space flight operations as well. Let the competition drive innovation, not have patents block off that innovation.
That said… for all of Musk’s talk about all this, that hasn’t stopped Tesla from going after EV competitor Rivian, claiming the company was “stealing trade secrets” after it hired a bunch of former Tesla employees. You can try to argue that trade secrets are different than patents, but if Musk’s underlying reason for freeing up Tesla’s patents was to encourage more competition and better develop the EV space, as he claimed, it’s hard to square that with the aggressive lawsuits against Rivian.'
Filed Under: competition, elon musk, innovation, jay leno, patents
Companies: spacex, tesla
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