433 Eros - Legal Controversy

Legal Controversy

In an experimental legal case, Eros was claimed as property by Gregory W. Nemitz of OrbDev. Nemitz argued that, according to the homestead principle, he had the right to claim ownership of any celestial body that he made use of; he claimed he had designated Eros a spacecraft parking facility and wished to charge NASA a parking and storage fee of twenty cents per year for NEAR Shoemaker. An expert in extraterrestrial real estate issues, Virgiliu Pop, responded by using the same novelty-deed registry Nemitz had used for Eros to claim ownership of the Sun, stating:

I, for one, intended this move only to show how ridiculous a property rights system in outer space would be if it were to be based solely on claim unsubstantiated by any actual possession. —Virgiliu Pop

Nemitz's case was dismissed and an appeal denied.

Read more about this topic:  433 Eros

Famous quotes containing the words legal and/or controversy:

    I am opposed to writing about the private lives of living authors and psychoanalyzing them while they are alive. Criticism is getting all mixed up with a combination of the Junior F.B.I.- men, discards from Freud and Jung and a sort of Columnist peep- hole and missing laundry list school.... Every young English professor sees gold in them dirty sheets now. Imagine what they can do with the soiled sheets of four legal beds by the same writer and you can see why their tongues are slavering.
    Ernest Hemingway (1899–1961)

    And therefore, as when there is a controversy in an account, the parties must by their own accord, set up for right Reason, the Reason of some Arbitrator, or Judge, to whose sentence, they will both stand, or their controversy must either come to blows, or be undecided, for want of a right Reason constituted by Nature; so is it also in all debates of what kind soever.
    Thomas Hobbes (1579–1688)