“The only thing wrong that I saw when I held Barbie,” Alex Kozinski, then the chief judge of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, who presided over Mattel v. MGA, said, joking, “is when I lift her skirt there is nothing underneath.”
Corporate ownership of ideas, the dramatic extension of the terms of copyright, and a wild expansion of what counts as protectable intellectual property have together undermined the original purpose of intellectual-property law. Nine out of ten patents granted in the United States are now owned by corporations. Congress passed ten copyright-extension acts in the course of the twentieth century; copyright now lasts for seventy years after the death of the author. Corporations have attempted to claim exclusive legal rights to everything from yoga moves to genetic sequences.
Language difficulty categories of the FSI. Updated since French and German have been changed.
Pruitt tried to justify the fact that he’s extremely close with the fossil fuel industry by claiming these relationships “will ultimately make the air cleaner and the water safer to drink,” the Sierra Club said in a statement Friday. In the statement, the environmental group contends “the worst EPA administrator ever would like you to believe he’s an environmentalist.”
“Scott Pruitt is an environmental steward in the same way the Marlboro Man is fighting lung cancer. Pruitt’s obvious disconnect from reality is dangerous to your health, and his systematic destruction of our clean air and water laws is one of the biggest crises in our federal government today,” Sierra Club Executive Director Michael Brune said in the statement.
Nasa says it is possible statistically to remove the natural warming and cooling effects that come from El Niño and La Niña. When this smoothing is done (red line), 2017 comes out warmer than any previous year. The grey columns denote major volcanic eruptions that ordinarily depress the warming trend.
Excerpts:
The World Meteorological Organization Secretary-General Petteri Taalas said the long-term temperature trend was far more important than the ranking of individual years.
“Arctic warmth has been especially pronounced and this will have profound and long-lasting repercussions on sea levels, and on weather patterns in other parts of the world.”
Prof Richard Allan from the University of Reading said: “Rather than warming being inconsequential or catastrophic, as some have suggested, we can be sure societies are facing a dangerous temperature rise, but one which we still have time to fix.
“The conclusions confirm that human-caused climate change is a serious concern.
“But if we act now with sustained and substantial cuts in greenhouse gas emissions, societies will still be able to avoid much of the most dangerous climate change predicted by computer simulations.”
The Times editorial board has been sharply critical of the Trump presidency, on grounds of policy and personal conduct. Not all readers have been persuaded. In the spirit of open debate, and in hopes of helping readers who agree with us better understand the views of those who don’t, we wanted to let Mr. Trump’s supporters make their best case for him as the first year of his presidency approaches its close. Tomorrow we’ll present some letters from readers who voted for Mr. Trump but are now disillusioned, and from those reacting to today’s letters and our decision to provide Trump voters this platform.
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