Shuffling Sports
Re: “What about Mariotti?,” posted by Michael Miner, December 7
The criticism of Ryan did not begin after it was all over. This was not mere hindsight criticism. The criticism began as soon as he took office in Du Page County for continuing the prosecution of Cruz, Hernandez, and Buckley that his predecessor had begun. Many people saw the flaws in the case from the get-go, and as the flaws just grew and grew and the case became more and more a scandal, what did Ryan do? He continued to soldier on, ignoring all the accumulated evidence that they had the wrong guy. He and his cohorts even ignored what Bryan Dugan was saying—they refused to hear what he was saying. Why? Some might say that their reason was that they feared Dugan might exonerate the guys they were prosecuting.
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Art in a Garden
For further information, see Chapter 6 (“The Definition of Art”), and the section “Art and the Law” in Chapter 15, of What Art Is: The Esthetic Theory of Ayn Rand (Open Court, 2000), which I coauthored.
Mr. Torres: As I recall, Judge Coar’s ruling that the Wildflower Works was not copyrightable was based on the assertion that Kelley was not the first to create art out of garden elements, flowers, dirt, etc. This stringent criteria for originality bears no relationship to what the Copyright Law requires.
