“I have established a right of way through the centre of old Middleton’s park, slap across it, sir, within a hundred yards of his own front door. What do you think of that? We’ll teach these magnates that they cannot ride rough-shod over the rights of the commoners, confound them! And I’ve closed the wood where the Fernworthy folk used to picnic. These infernal people seem to think that there are no rights of property, and that they can swarm where they like with their papers and their bottles.”
While true, Khosla is a particularly wet sack of baby shit. Nobody else tries to bring their case to the goddamn Supreme Court. Everyone else just files a token lawsuit against the county or whatever and backs down when it’s clear they’re going to lose.
Khosla says it’s a “matter of principle”. He’s right: the principle he’s trying to maintain is a reputation for being a completely intransigent ass. He knows that he has no other value to anyone, and that shitty reputation he all he has. Losing the case to a bunch of dippy Californian surfers is an enormous embarrassment and the other dudes in his tres commas club are gonna be making fun of him for the rest of his sad life.
I wasn’t talking about access to the beach, but rather the acumen of the lawyers who managed to get people afraid of using pictures of a freaking tree that the Pebble Beach Co. didn’t have a blame thing to do with being there in the first place.
Sadly, this argument works in Texas regarding navigable rivers and their average streambeds, which are the property of the state. The exception is land that is part of an original Spanish land grant. So you can be floating along perfectly legally and suddenly encounter gunfire. I suppose the shooting part is covered under the Castle Doctrine to prevent innocent property owners from being attacked with an inner tube.
