I Become Part Of A Leading 1st Amendment Law Team
My intern transitions into his brilliant career as State Assistant Attorney General.
I start getting requests from churches, nursing homes, orphanages, inner-city-ministries, etc. to use our songs.
Read those requests!
It breaks your heart!
These wonderful, giving people have been tricked by copyright "nazi's" into thinking they need permission before they can sacrifice their own personal time and money to present our songs in money-losing presentations to dying elderly people and poor inner city kids and starving orphans in Kazakstan!
I answer, "Of course, you don't even have to ask."
But increasingly, I hear nonsense like this:
"Sorry, your verbal/email/web permission is not enough. My pastor says [our accountant says blah blah we need a CCLi control number, and the copyright act and Romans 13 says] we can't use your songs and plays unless you send us a written, signed license, and we pay you money as consideration for the contract."
OK - I'm busy. I don't need $50. I need my time.
I know that we copyright owners and the ministries are being led on a wild-goose chase by church lawyers and licensing pushers who get themselves paid big bucks by fictitiously painting the copyright act as complicated and scary.
We can't pay staff to answer licensing requests that won't pay for the staff to answer the licensing requests!
So we put up web page clarifying that anybody can use our music anytime, anywhere, for any reason, and if they misuse that generosity, like using our song in a porn film, then the Almighty will pay them back, but we'll never sue them.
That covers most of the issues.
The reason I can't deal with these one-off licenses is that I'm transitioning into a mixture of direct 3rd-world ministry and secular film-making, finding the famously corrupt Hollywood movie business to be no more corrupt than the Christian music business, but offering considerably larger reach.
(Reflecting the similar decision of Jesus to spend most of his time teaching outside of the Jewish temple.)
In the process of researching for writing movies, I get involved with the Amish.
Before long, I'm donating time as a volunteer legal research/writer with a team called Amish Legal Defense, protecting the rights of the Amish to preserve their separated, holy way of life, against onslaughts of what administrators
We're the "Batman" of religious rights defense ... you don't know when we're gonna show up, but if you're hassling some poor honest guy, you hope we never swoop in.
Nazi |หnรคtsฤ|
noun
โข colloquially, a person who holds extreme authoritarian views relatable to those of National Socialism, in which the government is seen as the source of inalienable rights, not the protector of them.
We in Amish Legal Defense help law-abiding, moral, self-governing people such as the Amish to:
- Preserve their right to water their plants with their sink-water (grey-water) and use sanitary composting toilets, in the face of draconian demands that they connect to public sewers or licensed septic tanks.
- Travel across borders without using biometric passports (licenses to travel).
- Conduct their personal, non-commercial automobiles on public roads, without biometric driver's licenses,
- raise and educate their children privately, as the scripture dictates, without teaching licenses,
- avoid the demands of licensed doctors and licensed social workers that they inject their children with vaccinations which have a statistically greater chance of harming the child than the disease the vaccination is intended to prevent,
- to produce and trade fresh, clean raw milk and probiotic health-products, without medical or agricultural licenses,
- And to abstain from all involvement with any social insurance system,
- Abstain from registering their children,
- avoid becoming married to the state by signing a marriage license
- and to weather a great variety of other legal challenges from un-american socialist encroachment which seeks to require a state license for, and reporting and registration of countless acts which previous generations understood to be inalienable rights.
So you see, the common thread is that:
if neither the Bible nor the Law demand that you get a license for an activity, or report your activity,
then we're here to make sure you aren't railroaded into signing a license or making an unnecessary report, both of which could be construed as confessions against yourself
-- confessions of imaginary 'crimes' which are not unlawful in the first place.
We don't sue people.
We make bad lawsuits fizzle into thin air.
How?
We compile briefs, and the appropriate licensed attorneys happily review them and sign them.
In these briefs the U.S. Supreme Court (and other relevant authorities) demolish the arguments of the unconstitutional aggressors, leaving the citizen free to exercise his inalienable rights, especially his right to free expression of his bona-fide religious convictions.
A perfect fit for tackling the scourge of worship licensing.
And really, invalidating worship license demands is a walk in the park compared to proving that absent your agreement to the contrary, you don't need a license to drive, or a passport to enter or exit the U.S., or a license to get married, or a license to teach, all of which are facts proven beyond a shadow of a doubt.
