Whether you're an inventor, designer, writer or programmer, you need to understand the language of intellectual property law. Otherwise, you can't intelligently deal with intellectual property issues such as: who owns creative works or valuable information; how owners can protect and enforce their ownership rights; how disputes between intellectual property owners can be resolved, and how ownership rights can best be transferred to others. With Patent,...

The laws covering intellectual property--those products of the imagination with commercial value, such as fictional writing, software designs, product names, and mechanical inventions--have long boggled the minds of the uninitiated. With the advent of online commerce and publishing, the issues have only gotten more confusing. The new edition of Patent, Copyright & Trademark: A Desk Reference to Intellectual Property Law, by attorney Stephen Elias,...

"A smart, lively history of the Internet free culture movement and its larger effects on society--and the life and shocking suicide of Aaron Swartz, a founding developer of Reddit and Creative Commons--from Slate correspondent Justin Peters. Aaron Swartz was a zealous young advocate for the free exchange of information and creative content online. He committed suicide in 2013 after being indicted by the government for illegally downloading millions...

Nam̕ reports that legitimate global trade has doubled since 1990 from $5 to $10 trillion. Meanwhile, money laundering has gone up tenfold, exceeding $1 trillion a year. Smuggling and money laundering have always existed, but Nam̕ shows how they have increased at a staggering pace in the wake of globalization, despite new government controls since 9/11.

Lawrence Lessig, "the most important thinker on intellectual property in the Internet era" (The New Yorker), is often called our leading cultural environmentalist. His focus is the ecosystem of creativity, the environment created around it by technology and law. To read Free Culture is to understand that the health of that ecosystem is in grave peril. While new technologies always lead to new laws, Lessig shows that never before have the big cultural...