Extending to collectibles generally a law that had applied to autographed sports memorabilia, California law will now require dealers of signed items priced above $5 to provide a certificate of authenticity on pain of severe legal penalties. The certificate, which must be retained by the seller for seven years, must include sensitive information such as the name and street address of the former owner. One of many big problems with that: it could halt the sale of countless old books signed by their authors or former owners. One force behind passage of the law: celebrity Mark Hamill had expressed frustration over trade in items allegedly signed by him. The bill’s sponsor says she did not intend it to apply to booksellers, but the language of the statute affords them no exclusion. [LitHub, earlier]
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You know, they came first for all the children’s books, because they might contain substances that might be somehow associated with danger to children. Now, they are coming after other books, which have been authenticated by the author, because they need to protect the adults from false signatures (aka fraud). And then there is Hillary and the MSM, who want to put a stop to “fake news” and stories that hurt the feelings of people like Hillary.
If I did not know better, I might suspect that these are all part of an attempt to effectively establish a Ministry of Truth, by throwing all the bad printed material and bad stories down the memory hole.
You don’t know better.