Strange Coincidences: Tainted Toothpaste and the Intellectual Property Cops
It seemed a little fishy earlier this year when news first broke of tainted toothpaste from China. Was it totally coincidental that those disclosures came just as Congress was about […]
Property and Freedom: Those Who Saw What Was Coming
In my last post I reflected on how an excessive assertion of property rights can turn this supposed bulwark of freedom into a threat to it. Intellectual property is an especially […]
The Property Police State: Alberto Gonzalez Seeks More Power to Tap Our Phones
There was a time, long ago, when the concept of “property” was a bulwark against an oppressive and arbitrary state. But the supposed bulwark has turned into a means of […]
GMO Seeds, the Green Revolution, and the Corporate Enclosure of Agriculture
The Straus Dairy near my town has gained a national reputation for innovation. It was the nation’s first organic dairy West of the Mississippi. It converts methane gas from bovine […]
The Seed Gestapo and Third World Farmers
In my wife’s dialect of kari-ya, which is spoken on the island of Panay, in the Philippines, there is a word binhi, which refers to the grains of rice that are […]
Inkjet Printers, Patents and Business Plan Protection
It seems almost a law of human nature that we become replicas of that which we rebel against. Children turn into revised versions of the parent they hate. The karmic […]
When Patents Become “Financial Assets”: Megabuck Patent Trolls and the Conflict Between Production and Finance
A little over a century ago, in the wake of the crash of 1895, Brooks Adams, brother of the more famous Henry, set out to understand the role of money […]
Who Owns the Batting Average of David Ortiz?
Let’s suppose that the Diebold Corporation gained a monopoly on vote counting in the U.S., and then tried to charge a royalty for the use of vote counts in news […]
Bamboo for Who?
Once again the question: who would bother to develop a technology for which they didn’t hold a patent monopoly? And once again the answer: lots of people. Today’s case in […]