Why would a clause apply until 21 years after the death of the last descendant of King Charles III? Inspired by this question, why might any corporation draft a legal document containing provisions that are random, arbitrary, and completely beyond their control? In case the question is deleted, it had to do with Disney maintaining control over its districts &quot;until twenty one (21) years after the death of the last survivor of the descendants of King Charles III, King of England living as of the date of this declaration.&quot; (I don't have access to the document quoted in the other question.) The rule against perpetuity makes some sense from an estate planning perspective, (a just-borne heir would reach the age of majority to be able inherit property 21 years following a death) but what rationale is there for preventing an on-going legal entity from tying any or all of its legal documents directly to the continued existence of the entity itself?
It’s a common law rule dating from the 17th to 19th centuries Known as the rule against perpetuities “that prevents people from using legal instruments (usually a deed or a will) to exert control over the ownership of private property for a time long beyond the lives of people living at the time the instrument was written.” The rule has its origin in the Duke of Norfolk's Case of 1682. That case concerned Henry, 22nd Earl of Arundel, who had tried to create a shifting executory limitation so that some of his property would pass to his eldest son (who was mentally deficient) and then to his second son, and other property would pass to his second son, but then to his fourth son. The estate plan also included provisions for shifting property many generations later if certain conditions should occur. When his second son, Henry, succeeded to his elder brother's property, he did not want to pass the other property to his younger brother, Charles. Charles sued to enforce his interest, and the court (in this instance, the House of Lords) held that such a shifting condition could not exist indefinitely. The judges believed that tying up property too long beyond the lives of people living at the time was wrong, although the exact period was not determined until another case, Cadell v. Palmer, 150 years later. Historically, the rule was no longer than 21 years from the death of some person alive at the time the trust or estate was created. However, that person(s) must be limited and identifiable. Which led to the creation of Royal lives clauses. The descendants of British monarchs became popular because it’s easy to find out who they are, even many years after the fact, and that family tends to live a long time. Other popular choices, particularly in the United States, are the descendants of John D. Rockefeller or Joseph P. Kennedy. This is often only one of the conditions for the end of the trust and becomes a “savings clause” to prevent violation of the rule if the other conditions are (or become) too far in the future. The period has been changed or abolished by statute in many jurisdictions. For example, England and Wales has adopted a flat 125 year limit. As a state-based law, the United States is hugely variable. Examples For example, one of the businesses I run operates under a trust deed that says: &quot;The Vesting Date&quot; means the first to occur of the following three dates namely:- (i) Sixty years after the date of this Deed. (ii) Twenty years after the date of the death of the last survivor of the lineal descendants of His late Majesty King George V born and living at the date hereof or, (iii) The date (if any) which the Trustee shall in his discretion appoint as the distribution date of this settlement. The deed was made in 1982, which partly explains its style and implicit sexism, but I suspect that the solicitor who drafted it has been using the clause about George V for a lot longer than that. As of today, there are 35 living people who fall into the definition, including Charles III (see if you can work out the others); since there are now less than 20 years to go until 60 years after the deed, the clause will never be relevant. Another business operates under a deed made in 2022: 14.1 Termination date The Trust shall be wound-up and terminate on the first to occur of: a) the date which The Trustee with the written consent of the Leading Member Appointer determines; or b) 80 years from the date of this deed unless a State law allows otherwise including South Australia. Note that the reference to living people is gone. Also, note the specific reference to South Australia, a jurisdiction that has abolished the rule against perpetuities. So long as they don't change their law back, this trust is effectively perpetual. Finally, not how much easier this is to read and skips the implicit sexism; progress. Why doesn’t it affect the property of ‘immortal’ entities like companies or governments? Because, in theory, it isn’t dead people telling living people what they can do with the property. While the organisation may be ‘eternal’ the people making decisions for that organisation aren’t - the directors and legislators/executives in charge today can decide what to do with the property. This includes having the capacity to rewrite the rules of the organisation. While it may be hard to change a company’s rules and very, very hard to change a country’s constitution, it isn’t impossible the way it is with a trust deed or a will. Changing a deed or will too much can result in resettlemet; creating a new trust and usually crystalising tax obligations the delaying of which was often one of the motivations for the trust in the first place.
Only if the company consents While some jurisdictions have by statute allowed corporations to be bound by pre-incorporation contracts, New York is not one of them and holds to the common law principle that a person cannot enter a contract before that person exists. In your circumstances the company is only bound by the second contract. So, who is bound by the first? Well, corporations can only act through agents and agency law tells us that an agent who purportedly acts for a non-existent principal is actually acting on their own behalf. So, the person(s) who signed for Company X on the first contract are personally bound to the contract. Unless they explicitly told Company Y that they wouldn’t be. It seems that they didn’t so Company Y can require performance of the first contract by them and of the second by Company X. Company Y must, of course, fulfil its obligations under both contracts - it needs to bear this in mind if it is actually impossible to do both, for example, transferring the same property to the signers of the first contract and Company X or becoming a full time employee of both. If so, it might be in Company Y’s best interests to let the first contract “die”.
Assuming, for purposes of argument, that such a change could be made by executive order, or indeed by legislation, rather than by amendment, yes, the change could and would have to have an effective date, and apply only to persons born after that date. Indeed that would still be true if such a change were made by constitutional amendment. Consider, people whose parents (or one of whose parents) are US citizens, but who are born outside of the US, are or may become citizens (by statute), but only if the citizen parent complies with certain rules specifying a minimum period of residence in the US, and other conditions. Those periods and conditions have changed over the years, and each such change had an effective date. If such a change could be made but could not be made with an effective date, then it would apply retroactively, and deprive people who are already citizens of their citizenship. There is no valid equal protection claim, because the same rules apply to both individuals, they merely give different results for the different birth dates. (See my answer to this question for why I do not think such a change would be valid except by Constitutional Amendment.) EDIT: I suppose such a changed interpretation, if made at all, might take the position that such births never did validly convey citizen ship, and all people whose parents were not validly in the country had never been citizens. That strikes me as even less likely to pass judicial review, but one cannot know what the Supreme Court will do when faced with a truly novel situation.
The GDPR has an exemption for purely personal or household activity. Creating a family tree seems purely personal as long as you don't publish it. You're also allowed to freely share the tree as long as it stays within that purely personal scope. Your proposed restriction of only showing data of blood relatives seems excessively strict. But assuming that this exemption wouldn't apply, there'd probably still be no problem. The GDPR does not require you to always obtain consent. It requires that the purposes for which you process personal data are covered by some legal basis. Consent is one such legal basis, but legitimate interest is another. You can likely argue that you have a legitimate interest to create a tree of your (extended) family. The legitimate interest must be weighed against the rights and freedoms of the affected persons. For example, contact information could be used for stalking. The balance of the legitimate interest check can be changed if you adopt suitable safeguards. Your idea of only sharing data with close relatives would be such a safeguard, but it might not be necessary. When you rely on legitimate interest, the affected person can object to further processing, furthermore they can request to be erased from your records. A request for erasure can be denied if there are overriding grounds to keep the data. E.g maybe only contact information has to be deleted but names, dates, and relations might be kept. You should notify persons when they are included into your records. It is your obligation as the data controller to make these decisions. If someone disagrees they can sue you or lodge a complaint with a supervision authority. Note that dead persons are not natural persons in the sense of the GDPR, and have no privacy. However, national laws may provide such protections.
The issue is discussed in quite a few cases, including an in depth discussion in Eldred v. Ashcroft, 537 U.S. 186 (2003). The Official Syllabus of that decision summarizes its analysis: The Copyright and Patent Clause, U. S. Const., Art. I, § 8, cl. 8, provides as to copyrights: &quot;Congress shall have Power ... [t]o promote the Progress of Science ... by securing [to Authors] for limited Times ... the exclusive Right to their ... Writings.&quot; In the 1998 Copyright Term Extension Act (CTEA), Congress enlarged the duration of copyrights by 20 years: Under the 1976 Copyright Act (1976 Act), copyright protection generally lasted from a work's creation until 50 years after the author's death; under the CTEA, most copyrights now run from creation until 70 years after the author's death, 17 U. S. C. § 302(a). As in the case of prior copyright extensions, principally in 1831, 1909, and 1976, Congress provided for application of the enlarged terms to existing and future copyrights alike. Petitioners, whose products or services build on copyrighted works that have gone into the public domain, brought this suit seeking a determination that the CTEA fails constitutional review under both the Copyright Clause's &quot;limited Times&quot; prescription and the First Amendment's free speech guarantee. Petitioners do not challenge the CTEA's &quot;life-plus-70-years&quot; timespan itself. They maintain that Congress went awry not with respect to newly created works, but in enlarging the term for published works with existing copyrights. The &quot;limited Tim[e]&quot; in effect when a copyright is secured, petitioners urge, becomes the constitutional boundary, a clear line beyond the power of Congress to extend. As to the First Amendment, petitioners contend that the CTEA is a content-neutral regulation of speech that fails inspection under the heightened judicial scrutiny appropriate for such regulations. The District Court entered judgment on the pleadings for the Attorney General (respondent here), holding that the CTEA does not violate the Copyright Clause's &quot;limited Times&quot; restriction because the CTEA's terms, though longer than the 1976 Act's terms, are still limited, not perpetual, and therefore fit within Congress' discretion. The court also held that there are no First Amendment rights to use the copyrighted works of others. The District of Columbia Circuit affirmed. In that court's unanimous view, Harper &amp; Row, Publishers, Inc. v. Nation Enterprises, 471 U. S. 539, foreclosed petitioners' First Amendment challenge to the CTEA. The appeals court reasoned that copyright does not impermissibly restrict free speech, for it grants the author an exclusive right only to the specific form of expression; it does not shield any idea or fact contained in the copyrighted work, and it allows for &quot;fair use&quot; even of the expression itself. A majority of the court also rejected petitioners' Copyright Clause claim. The court ruled that Circuit precedent precluded petitioners' plea for interpretation of the &quot;limited Times&quot; prescription with a view to the Clause's preambular statement of purpose: &quot;To promote the Progress of Science.&quot; The court found nothing in the constitutional text or history to suggest that a term of years for a copyright is not a &quot;limited Tim[e]&quot; if it may later be extended for another &quot;limited Tim[e].&quot; Recounting that the First Congress made the 1790 Copyright Act applicable to existing copyrights arising under state copyright laws, the court held that that construction by contemporaries of the Constitution's formation merited almost conclusive weight under Burrow-Giles Lithographic Co. v. Sarony, 111 U. S. 53, 57. As early as McClurg v. Kingsland, 1 How. 202, the Court of Appeals recognized, this Court made it plain that the Copyright Clause permits Congress to amplify an existing patent's terms. The court added that this Court has been similarly deferential to Congress' judgment regarding copyright. E. g., Sony Corp. of America v. Universal City Studios, Inc., 464 U. S. 417. Concerning petitioners' assertion that Congress could evade the limitation on its authority by stringing together an unlimited number of &quot;limited Times,&quot; the court stated that such legislative misbehavior clearly was not before it. Rather, the court emphasized, the CTEA matched the baseline term for United States copyrights with the European Union term in order to meet contemporary circumstances. Held: In placing existing and future copyrights in parity in the CTEA, Congress acted within its authority and did not transgress constitutionallimitations. Pp. 199-222. The CTEA's extension of existing copyrights does not exceed Congress' power under the Copyright Clause. Pp. 199-218. (a) Guided by text, history, and precedent, this Court cannot agree with petitioners that extending the duration of existing copyrights is categorically beyond Congress' Copyright Clause authority. The case most squarely on point to your question held that a telephone book is not sufficiently original as a constitutional matter to be subject to copyright. It held that originality, for copyright purposes, is constitutionally mandated for all works. Feist Publications, Inc. v. Rural Telephone Service Co., Inc., 499 U.S. 340 (1991). See also: Under the Copyright and Patent Clause, Congress' copyright authority is tied to the progress of science; its patent authority, to the progress of the useful arts. Golan v. Holder, 565 U.S. 302 (2012). Under this clause, Congress, to encourage people to devote themselves to intellectual and artistic creation, may guarantee to authors and investors a reward in form of control over sale or commercial use of copies of their books. Goldstein v. California, 412 U.S. 546 (1973). This clause is both grant of power and limitation; this clause is limited to promotion of advances in useful arts. Graham v. John Deere Co. of Kansas City, 383 U.S. 1 (1966). The economic philosophy behind this clause empowering Congress to grant patents and copyrights is the conviction that encouragement of individual effort by personal gain is best way to advance public welfare through talents of authors and inventors in Science and useful Arts. Mazer v. Stein , 347 U.S. 201 (1954). The Copyright Act of Congress, R.S. § 4952, as amended by the Act Mar. 3, 1891, c. 565, 26 Stat. 1106, giving to authors the exclusive right to dramatize any of their works, is valid as applied to pantomine dramatization by means of moving picture films. Kalem Co. v. Harper Bros., 222 U.S. 55 (1911). This section does not limit the useful to that which satisfies immediate bodily needs, and painting and engraving not intended for a mechanical end are among the useful arts, the progress of which Congress is empowered by this section to promote. Bleistein v. Donaldson Lithographing Co., 188 U.S. 239 (1903). No authority exists for obtaining a copyright beyond the extent to which Congress has authorized it; a copyright cannot be sustained as a right existing at common law, but depends wholly on the legislation of Congress. Banks v. Manchester, 128 U.S. 244 (1888). Legislation concerning trademark protection is not authorized by this clause. In re Trade-Mark Cases, 100 U.S. 82 (1879). A list of U.S. Supreme Court cases on the issue of copyright at Wikipedia includes many additional copyright cases that don't implicate the U.S. Constitutional language. It is also worth noting that while the U.S. Supreme Court is the final and most authoritative interpreter of the U.S. Constitution, that any court presented with an issue of constitutional interpretation can, and indeed, is duty bound, to interpret the constitutional in a legally authoritative way, which in the case of appellate courts (state and federal) serves as a legal precedent for other cases that &quot;makes law&quot; on the issue.
He has this phrased like it's the ability to decide which laws you follow, and that it's an ability being withheld from the general public (although I seriously doubt that at least the former is the case). This is yet another false claim made by "freemen" or those who claim "common law defences". Notice of Understanding has no legal meaning unless the context demands that it evidences a meeting of the minds for the purposes of contract formation. It is a well-settled principle of common law that in order to be bound by a contract, there must be an agreement. Put simply, I cannot bind someone simply by sending them a Notice unless it is a right conferred on me by some earlier statute or legislation, or legally binding agreement. I tried searching for a solid definition, but all I could find was people/organization's Notice of Understanding and Intent and Claim of Rights. The reason you've found nothing official about the terms Notice of Understanding and Intent and Claim of Rights is that there is nothing official or legal about those terms. They are ordinary terms with ordinary meaning being bastardised by deluded people who believe they can fine the government and refuse to be bound by the law of the land. Of course, none of this holds up. What is the purpose of declaring your Notice of Understanding and Intent and Claim of Rights? It might make you feel better, even though it has no legal, practical or other effect.
The doctrine of judicial estoppel could potentially be applied in the manner that you suggest. The doctrine is applied in a manner that involves considerable discretion (unlike the similar doctrine of collateral estoppel, which makes judicial determinations against a party on the merits in a litigated case binding against the party against whom it was decided in future cases, in which there is much less judicial discretion). So, it isn't a lock solid winning argument that can be convincingly relied upon. But, it is a legitimate argument that a party can make in a lawsuit that would sometimes win. Footnote Large corporations are unique, in that they (1) enter into adhesive contracts with millions of people, (2) get sued a lot, and (3) often use outside counsel. For what it is worth, most businesses and government agencies, large and small, enter into adhesive contracts, often with at least hundred or thousands of people, if not with millions of people, and many get into frequently lawsuits and sometimes use outside counsel. So, the uniqueness of large corporations is somewhat overstated in the question.
In principle, there is an original copyright and a copyright of the revised version, but this makes no difference in the duration of a copyright of a natural person which is 70 years from the death of the author. It also has no effect on the duration of the copyright of a corporate work where the legal author is not a natural person, which is 95 years from first publication or 120 years from creation, whichever is shorter. The main reason to update the notice is that giving a copyright notice is one factor necessary to obtain special remedies such as statutory damages and attorneys fees, rather than merely compensatory economic damages. If you don't update the copyright notice for a new version, then these special remedies won't be available when it is the new material that is copied in violation of the copyright law. Updating the copyright notice used to be a much bigger deal when the duration of a copyright was 26 years from publication, and renewable only once for an additional 26 years, as it was pre-1978. Under that regime, a claim of copyright was necessary for a copyright to be present and it was only available for published work, unlike current law under which a copyright with minimal protections arises automatically by operation of law upon the creation of the work.