"But if the government can essentially revoke a private individual or company's copyright merely by incorporating otherwise protected text into legislation, that can have adverse effects on copyright holders."
This is a settled area of law; revoking the copyright would be a "taking", inarguably for the public good, and the copyright holder would be entitled to just compensation.
IMO that is the appropriate way to handle this issue; effectively the government uses eminent domain to seize the copyright.
> the copyright holder would be entitled to just compensation.
I would suggest that for a lot of organizations whose code has become written into laws, the organizations actually benefit from their incorporation even if they were to be required to release the copyright. They may lose some 'access-control' revenue from release of the copyright, but overall their closeness to the rules gives them ample opportunity to make money from associated services (e.g. training, consulting, membership and influence on revisions to name a few).
I'd characterize it as their fitness function is "amount of profit generated" and they attempt to maximize that. Or are you saying financial firms would voluntarily leave profit on the table in order to help mitigate systemic risk?
In Alan Greenspan's testimony to Congress on the 2008 crash he said he believed Wall St. was smart enough to do exactly that: collectively manage systemic risk by factoring it in, which would necessarily reduce profits by forsaking some short terms gains.
That sounds fine, if it means that "routing around" regulation involves actually creating the amount of redundancy necessary to survive a crash or downturn. No, not everything should be leveraged to the damn hilt. Prices are supposed to be signals about expected utilities, right? Well, those expectations can be wrong, and the system should be made to factor in the known fact that those expectations are wrong with certain known frequencies.
Well, from what I gather here, decentralized power isn't faring vary fairly for at least some of the pop.
The current decentralization is resulting in abuse an lack of accountability. I'm sure we could devise community oversight over the state police force. At least the police could have less variance and without the pressure to raise funds from citing locals, provide a fairer police force.
In addition, non-violent offenses concerning alcohol are heavily skewed toward a racial component of white yet seem to not related to violent offenses at all.
You're going to have to work a lot harder to show causality.
Those numbers conflate "ever sold" with "sold in the last N days", and yearly vs. weekly usage rates. For regular usage (which would be expected to track sales, and possession) the numbers are substantially higher for blacks.
Cannot "arrest" something that's not a natural person, but yes, they could absolutely seize a bot under a number of civil forfeiture laws, or likely as evidence. The burden would be on the owner to sue to get it back.
I've always heard that with civil forfeiture they are "arresting the money". Isn't that arresting a non-person? Or have I just been reading simplifications?
Simplifications. "Arrest" has specific meaning in most jurisdictions. "Seizing" would be more appropriate; one can seize property as well as persons, and in the case of persons there can be a seizure without an arrest.
The point is what a designation is for; in the case of an arrest vs detention or seizure for natural persons, it's usually an elaborate shell game around when various search doctrines or other restraints on police behavior kick in. In the case of property, the only point is to grab your stuff; the circumstances surrounding it don't particularly matter because they can always decide later under one doctrine or another that they're entitled to keep it.
This is a settled area of law; revoking the copyright would be a "taking", inarguably for the public good, and the copyright holder would be entitled to just compensation.
IMO that is the appropriate way to handle this issue; effectively the government uses eminent domain to seize the copyright.