Is inheritance justified?

Yesterday I went to Mannington Hall, the residence of Robin Walpole in North Norfolk. He had a allowed it to be open to the public for charity. It is a house that has been in his family for some three or four hundred years. he got it be being born!

Earlier in the week that was a discussion on the radio about why the famous speech by Martin Luther King was heard so rarely. The copywright is owned by the Martin Luther King Foundation and the charge for its use. Now copywright on books, music etc all tend to be lost about 40 years after the death of the originator.

I was speculating, what is the difference.  Compare Mr Walpole and some descendant of Charles Dickens, they can make no use of the books that Charles Dickens wrote but Mr Walpole still gas access to all the properties his ancestor bought all those years ago.

Should intellectual property be considered any differently? It might apply to patent as well. if a company has a patent it expires after a certain number of years but if it owns a coal mine it lasts forever.

Is this a historical anomaly, remember the laws were developed by the land owners to protect their own interests and that still seems to be a fundamental attitude in English law. Is it time for a radical rethink

How competent is the NSA?

It is curious that in all the discussion of David Miranda and Edward Snowden, there seems to be little criticism of NSA for ever employing him and enabling access to so many documents.

In the case in court about Miranda there was mention of over 5,000 highly sensitive documents on the hard disc.how the hell did he get hold of them. Not only that they seem to be of British agents and British documents.

If my understanding is correct, in this world it is hard to know who to believe, Snowden was employed by some outside company ( does not say a lot for outsourcing). One would assume that he had been properly vetted but as he was not employed directly the vetting might not have been as detailed as it would be for a formal employee.

The obvious question that has not been answered is how did he have access to so many files, many of which appear to be UK based. What has the UK government and GCHQ done about this complete failure by NSA and what has Obama and the USA government done. It would seem to me that there are a lot of questions to be answered about the security processes at both the NSA and GCHQ. Surely it is time that some senior heads rolled at those institutions.

In Britain I am not sure whether William Hague or Theresa May is responsible but they should be explaining what went wrong. And, whilst Malcolm Rifkind, Chair of the appropriate Commons committee, should be demanding answers to these question. For example can we trsut the NSA with its current leadership?