Shinycroak

My wife noticed this morning that some jewelry she had bought was a knock-off of a local craft artist's work. Which inspired me to do some research on intellectual property for jewelers. Turns out that designs can be copyrighted or (if three-dimensional) patented. Copyright protection is easy and cheap, but patents provide more protection. This bird's short take on this is to copyright almost everything; patent only designs that you expect to make a lot of money from. Cites: Creative Arts Advocate article .  Etsy policy statement . Nolo Press: The Craft Artist's Legal Guide . Oooh, shiny!

Akerlof and Shiller, Phishing for Phools: The Economics of Manipulation and Deception . Princeton University Press, 2015. 257 pp. This book, by Nobel-winning economics professors George A. Akerlof (Georgetown University) and Robert J. Shiller (Yale University), is an extended discussion of the role of fraud in economics. The authors argue that fraud is a natural feature of unregulated markets and that fraud is as subject to economic equilibrium as any other product. They back the argument with multiple historical examples, including a short history of advertising, abuses in the pharmaceutical industry, a history of the discovery of the health risks of cigarettes. One entire chapter is spent on the return on investment of lobbying (at least 100 to 1, in the examples they give) while avoiding partisanship and current issues. Their examples are chosen to be safely in the past. It must have taken serious self-restraint not to talk about the financial disasters of the 2000s and the...