On Patenting Music and Patent Hypocrisy

In a recent issue of Greg Aharonian’s PatNews newsletter, he points out that it may be possible for patent law to be stretched to cover things like music, which have traditionally been held to be non-patentable. I reprint the entire entry below. In it, Aharonian fumes that patent attorneys don’t fulfill their “ethical” obligation to speak out on how far patent law can be extended. It bugs him that they are “silent”.

Mises: Defender of Freedom

Today, September 29, 2006 is the one-hundred-and-twenty-fifth anniversary of the birth of Ludwig von Mises, economist and social philosopher, who passed away in 1973. Mises was my teacher and mentor and the source or inspiration for most of what I know and consider to be important and worthwhile in these fields — of what enables me to understand the events shaping the world in which we live. I want to take this opportunity to pay tribute to him, because I believe that he deserves to occupy a major place in the intellectual history of modern times.

The Revolutionary War and the Destruction of the Continental

Certain historical cases of inflation, writes Thomas Woods, have become sufficiently notorious to become textbook examples of government printing presses run riot. In the twentieth century the classic episode was the German hyperinflation of 1923. The eighteenth century affords us the cases of the American and French Revolutions, and the monetary debasement for which those countries’ governments were responsible. In the American case, the continental currency lost so much of its value that it became common to describe something as worthless by saying it was “not worth a Continental.”

Ludwig von Mises: Scholar, Creator, Hero

The purpose of this essay is to discuss and celebrate the life and work of one of the great creative minds of our century. Ludwig von Mises was born on September 29, 1881, in the city of Lemberg (now Lvov), in Galicia, in the Austro-Hungarian Empire. His father, Arthur Edler von Mises, a Viennese construction engineer working for the Austrian railroads, was stationed in Lemberg at the time. Ludwig’s mother, Adele Landau, also came from a prominent family in Vienna: her uncle, Dr. Joachim Landau, was a deputy from the Liberal Party in the Austrian Parliament.

Three cheers for .... a senator?

This corsucating attack on ‘climate porn’ and the green witchfinders’ scientific ‘orthodoxy’ was delivered from the floor by Sentaor James Inhofe.

“...the media must roll back this mantra that there is scientific “consensus” of impending climatic doom as an excuse to ignore recent science. After all, there was a so-called scientific “consensus” that there were nine planets in our solar system until Pluto was recently demoted.”

Subscribe to