Court Reporter asserts intellectual property rights over O.J. Simpson trial transcripts

Via The Patry Copyright Blog I learn that the maintainer of a website that hosted the transcripts of the O.J. Simpson trial has shut the site down, temporarily at least. Here's the message he left:

Alas! I have been instructed by Christine M. Olson, court reporter of the Simpson criminal trial, that the trancripts are intellectual property and that I may no longer publish them on the Internet. Until I can get further clarification, I'm shutting down this archive for now.

I wonder why it took over a decade to tell me this.
Jack Walraven

Patry questions how the transcripts could be intellectual property.

The Wayback Machine won't give access to older versions of the transcripts site, or to the rest of Jack Walraven's site for that matter, though it does work for other sites I tried. Perhaps Christine Olson also convinced the Internet Archive to block access to the transcripts.

Update 2007/08/23 12:37: I finally thought to look at the Wayback Machine FAQ, as suggested in the error message. Here is the FAQ's explanation of that message:

Failed Connection: The server that the particular piece of information lives on is down. Generally these clear up within two weeks.

The server that serves walraven.org/simpson/ probably also serves walraven.org/, and if it is down, then it makes sense that both sites are unavailable. So let's keep checking back to see if they become available again.

Prager slaps butt, fails to ask questions later

Via a posting at Pajamas Media I found this article by Dennis Prager about his efforts to help two junior-high boys who were arrested and jailed for slapping the bottoms of girls at their school.

I think it's ridiculous that these boys were jailed for what they are alleged to have done. At the same time, I have no interest in helping Mr. Prager support them until I receive assurance that Mr. Prager would also support me if I were charged with assault for paddling their asses after I caught them slapping my junior-high-aged daughter's bottom.

Prager concludes with a sentiment I can agree with:

A democracy cannot long survive the contempt more and more Americans feel for American law.

That's a serious matter, and the incident Prager describes is a good illustration of it. However, I have the sense that that some conservatives also want to justify any almost any asinine or inconsiderate thing that boys do because "they're just being boys." I don't know that Mr. Prager holds to this point of view, but it's one for which I have no respect.