Check out YAL activities on campus and updates from around the liberty movement.
Intellectual property is an extremely divisive yet often overshadowed subject of debate between liberty-minded folk. Some embrace all forms of IP, while others completely reject all IP. This article falls into the latter. Intellectual property is a vital topic to understand for many reasons, not the least of which is the current and ongoing battle …
What is property? More specifically, at its essential theoretical core, beyond the artifice of legal fiat: what is property? Somewhat broadly, property is anything that satisfies each of the following requirements: property is scarce; property possesses objective (intersubjectively ascertainable) borders; and property has a determinable temporal genesis. The theory of intellectual property (IP) posits that …
Last month, the Global Intellectual Property Center (GIPC), in conjunction with the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, released a report evaluating intellectual property (IP) laws in eleven different countries. The report used five general categories—patent law, copyright law, trademark law, enforcement thereof, and participation in international treaties—as a basis for evaluation. The United States was ranked …
You can bet Mark Zuckerberg won’t “like” this. According to BBC, Facebook is being sued for its use of the “Like” button. It seems that Joannes Jozef Everardus van Der Meer—a quintessential Dutch name if there ever was one—patented a “Like” button for his primitive social networking site Surfbook in 1998. Van Der Meer passed …
Alan Wexelblat from Corante’s Copyfight blog responds to my SOPA-related post: As I am not libertarian, I was interested to read their point of view. In particular, Aheram asserts that copyright itself, by virtue of its government-granted monopolistic status, is an illegitimate infringement on sovereign private property rights. I suspect that others – even other …
Michael Geist’s keynote address discussing “the role of digital activism in countering bills like SOPA and the ongoing copyfight over the use of WIPO, ACTA, and aggressive laws to promote restrictive copyright rules.”
On Jan. 18, the world was audience to the one of the most visible online activism yet in Internet history. Taking part in the 24-hour protest were thousands of websites and millions of Internet users going head-to-head with Hollywood to oppose a pair of anti-piracy bills — the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) and Protect …
Senator Amy Klobuchar has introduced a bill S. 978, which would make it a criminal act to post movie clips or video of games online. This includes videos that are not downloadable and that are simply video clips of you taping what is happening on your own TV screen. This has particularly enraged gamers …
Most people are familiar with the Bible story of the time that Jesus fed 5000 people with only five loaves of bread and two fish. It is one of his best-known miracle stories. But has anyone stopped to think about what he was really doing? When Jesus fed the 5000 with five loaves of bread …
The owner of Luke’s Lounge, a small bar and long-time music venue in downtown Dixon, was informed late last year that he could not have live music in his bar unless he payed exorbitant licensing fees to the ASCAP (American Society of Composers, Authors, and Publishers). Here is part of a local article on the …
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