The New York Times had a great article in last week's small business section, called "A Small Business Guide to Intellectual Property." The article explores five common fallacies about intellectual property: 1. For small-business owners, it’s not worth the time or effort to secure intellectual property rights. Wrong. 2. Once [...]
Yesterday, Tom Bell posted a piece on the Technology Liberation Front blog entitled, "Unconstitutional Copyrights?". Mr. Bell provided a passage from his upcoming book, Intellectual Privilege: A Libertarian View of Copyright, in which he argues that copyright protection for songs, novels, movies, paintings and sculptures, is unconstitutional because these are [...]
The Economist has a great article on why innovative European companies, particularly small and medium-sized ones, need a single patent office and a unified court system for defending their inventions. The article even quotes a couple of ACT's European members.According to a recent paper, “Lost property: The European patent system [...]
A clown, a rabbit, and the Pope walk into a bar. Which one is against IP? OK, that’s putting it sort of harshly. And maybe it’s not even something that I should joke about. But the Pope did issue (is that the right word?) a cyclical last week in which [...]
Today’s tough economy creates fiscal pressures for state and federal government budgets. Resourceful policymakers are increasingly looking for ways to reduce or at least maximize their information technology (IT) spending, and utilizing free software and services is one possible direction. But what does “free” really mean?