Word: patents
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This is precisely where a freedom of speech argument defending this production derails. Play rights are like inventors of technical improvements in communication: each give us new "media" of expression, new ways people can communicate. The Constitution provides for patents and copyrights Granting these protections for a limited number of years just push back the arrival, the "gift" of the new "medium of expression." It does not stymie existing freedom of expression Unlike patent, copyright protects freedom of expression by making sure remains your expression...
...Specimen Days Walt Whitman created a terrible picture of the proximity of human progress and human frailty by describing the U.S. Patent Office when it was used as a hospital during the Civil War. There the dead and dying soldiers lay on cots surrounded by the latest inventions of the day, high shelves packed with gleaming instruments devised to ensure the world's safety and advancement. India provided some specimen days last week. On Monday the death toll was 410. On Friday, more than 2,500. By the weekend, numbers had no meaning any more, since no one could...
...photographs by Jonathan Wallen. Presidential papers go back to George Washington; State Department records to Revolutionary War naval prize cases; census records to the first one, in 1790. There are Mathew Brady's photographs, and Walker Evans' too, and confiscated photo albums once kept by Eva Braun. Patents go back further than Eli Whitney's cotton gin (1794), which was so simple to copy that Whitney made no money from it. Abraham Lincoln got a patent for a device to float boats over shoals (never used), and Samuel Clemens, who wrote real books as Mark Twain...
...admission to the three service academies rose by 59% between 1980 and 1984. Old Glory is having a heyday too. The Art Flag Co. of Manhattan, a major national distributor, reports a sales increase of 30% this year. During the Olympics, a Los Angeles County inventor was awarded a patent for his electric flag-waving machine. Ridiculous, maybe, but there is also the sublime. In San Francisco last July 2, as a pair of middle-aged bohemians left the Flag Shop with their purchase, a more orthodox customer arrived. "I'm surprised you'd sell a flag...
...write "dispense as written" or "no substitution" on their prescriptions. In addition, the big firms try to give their pills distinctive shapes and trademarks. Hoffmann-La Roche's Valium tranquilizer tablets, for example, have a V carved in the center. The company hopes that when Valium's patent expires next February, patients will be reluctant to change medicines and will ask for the pills with the familiar symbol...