"Is there anything to stop the US having any more amendments?"
No
"And can an amendment reverse anything in the previous amendments?"
Already has been done. It was called Prohibition and that was later repealed after 15 years or so.
"Is there anything to stop the US having any more amendments?"
No
"And can an amendment reverse anything in the previous amendments?"
Already has been done. It was called Prohibition and that was later repealed after 15 years or so.
The judge's statements about the lack of First Amendment protection applied regardless of the point about trespass etc. So in other words even if there was no trespass, according to this decision, there was no first amendment protection.Originally Posted by Ivan J. Eberle
It is not a well-etablished precendent yet however imagine this: photographers are constantly harrassed for taking photos of even public places. This is true in NYC as well as anywhere else and there were a number of lawsuits
However according to the reasoning employed in this case, they don't have a cause of action if they're just recreational, hobbyist photographers.
A UoP law review article addresses this issue on p 375 see the footnote for other cases
The Porat case was upheld on appeal to the 2nd Circuit
Are you citing a city court, superior court, appeals court, state court or federal court decision.
Seems if it was a trespassing matter it was a local judge's decision. Which isn't the greatest precedent for case law.
The Porat case was a Federal case. The issue of trespass is irrelevant to the point (in fact while Porat was initially cited for trespassing, all the charges against him were dismissed. AFTER that, he turned around and sued the city and Lincoln Towers for violating his First Amendment right to take photos. The court held that because he was merely a hobbyist taking photos for recreational purposes, he did not HAVE a first amendment right to take photos. The issue of trespassing was not relevant.)
In reading the complaint, by the way, the treatment given to this photographer by the police and building security guards was absolutely indefensible. He's Israeli and speaks with an accent. According to the complaint, the NYPD asked him if he came from a "non-European country". When he said what differece that would make, he was told that that it would. Pure discrimination. Later he and a photographer from the New York Post went and stood on the public sidewalk and took photos of the Lincoln Towers buildings, and the NY Post photographer was actually physically attacked by the building security guards & told that they weren't allowed to take photos EVEN from a public place.
But again none of this is relevant to the issue. According to this judge in this case, the "Right to Photography" only applies to "communicative photography" - meaning photography that is intended to communicate a particular message to an audience. There is no such right to recreational photography for your own enjoyment. There's no reason why this line of thinking can't be extended to other art forms - no right to recreational painting, no right to recreational writing, etc. If you're doing these things for your own personal amusement rather that to communicate a particular message to someone else, you can be legally prohibited from doing so.
This is a colossal red herring. Virtually everyone in the US takes digital snapshots from public and private property and while we may all be ostensibly subject to arrest it ain't gonna happen. Legally it isn't going to happen selectively and still hold up to even lower court scrutiny. The proliferation of digital camera images mostly taken on private property simply establishes a new societal norm that would be impossible to enforce against.
Claims against intrusive LF setups are just easier to harass against because they have a more obvious potential for public disruption.
My most recent brush with the law was for "creating a public nuisance" by a busy roadside and intersection even though digital snapshooters were photographing the same scene and were unmolested.
I have never been cited for "failure to comply with US first amendment right". Don't ever expect to be so cited.
Just stay cool, pleasant, and acccept that you are an "Oddball" and you'll be fine.
Nate Potter, Austin TX
Nate there is a bigger question at issue. You may not have been harassed but others were are are and will continue to be. Porat was not "unpleasant" to anyone either. Exercising your rights shuold not be a question of whether the police think you're "pleasant" or not. We don't live in a society where respect for basic rights is simply left up to the police to decide on their own discretion.
As for whether it is a red herring or not, apparently others have started to catch on about this. There is a very recent Rutgers Law Review article recently published that declares the PATH photography permit rules to be unconstitutional.
I don't think that a Law Review can decide the constitutionality of something. With all of the law schools and law reviews in the USA there are probably others who feel differently. It is the courts who will decide, not a group of law students. Now it will depend on how well they can present their views in a court against other advocates.
No one suggested that the law review "decides" anything. The point was that others also consider this to not be a 'red herring'. Other poeple - People other than me! - have looked into it and reached similar conclusions. So Im' not some sort of crazy lone crusader tilting at windmills.
The blog (or web) posting objective seems relevant. No court would expect a bona fide photojournalist not to make many photos in the hopes of publishing one. It is the intent to make a photo for communicative purposes that seems relevant to me.
If I post a picture on my web page, I obviously intend to communicate that photo to others, whether or not I get paid to do so. If I make a print and display it, I obviously intend to communicate it to others. But that does not seem to me the basis for requiring every single exposure to meet that test (or even any of them--even members of the press have no control over what might actually be published). Many, many, many photographs made by hobbyists for purposes other than communication have nevertheless used their photos to communicate in an obvious journalistic sense. Zabruder is just one obvious example of a hobbyist whose photography became protected expression.
A lot of times, what photographers believe about their rights hinges not on rights they actually possess, but rather on the rights of the photographed (animate or inanimate). Given that what is being photographed has no right to privacy if photographed from a public place (with certain defined exceptions), then it seems to me vacuous to argue that the photographer has no right to make the photograph. If the photographer has no right to make photographs, then why waste all this time arguing about the rights of the subjects of those photographs?
That leads back to the notion that perhaps photographers have rights simply because what they do is not illegal (i.e., we are allowed to do anything that is not specifically illegal, which is not the case in some legal systems but is in ours). That would not preclude a jurisdiction from making it illegal, but for that to stand up (even without constitutional entanglements), there would have to be proper notification (meaning: lots of signs) and some semblance of uniform enforcement. Because it is obviously unenforceable to make photography in most public places illegal, someone arrested for making a photograph would stand a good chance of overturning it because of that, without needing the First Amendment to shield them. If Sheriff Roscoe rolls a 10mph speed limit sign out in front of the Duke boys, it is not enforceable as long as the case is appealed past Judge Hogg, even though operating a motor vehicle is not a right at all, let alone one protected by the constitution. Maybe that's why the laws limiting photography that have stood up seem to be related to tripods and being a nuisance (by blocking a sidewalk, etc.)
I wonder if the Porat decision was at least partly based not on the right of the photographer to make photographs, but his right to trespass as a matter of free expression. He sued for false arrest, when he was arrested for trespass. Thus, he could only be claiming that he had a right to trespass on the basis of the First Amendment--being engaged in free expression gave him the right to trespass. I don't see how the issue of trespass can be made irrelevant. He can't sue for false arrest for making the photograph because he was not arrested for making the photograph. Maybe that's the real reason the courts rejected his suit, no matter what we read in the decision after the fact.
Rick "wondering what standing Porat had for a false-arrest claim" Denney
Porat was arrested for photography on a place that while technically private, was actually open to the public and the public regularly used that route to cross the "private" property. He didn't go marching into someone's back yard or anything of that sort. But in any case since the trespass charges were dropped we won't know whether he was actually trespassing (he wasn't on the property without permission after all, he just happened to be also taking pictures, and there was no sign or anything saying "no photography".) Note that later the buildig security guards were telling a news reporter that he couldn't photograph the buildings even from a public place - a very usual case of overzealous security guards, coupled with racists cops who had found a "non European" dude
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