Moon Law

Continuing our discussion about property, this week we’re focusing on intellectual property, a catch-all term covering patent, trademark, copyright and more. What are the differences between these fields of intellectual property? Alan is here to explain.

Because exploring the way property rights and justice evolved in every culture around the world would take too much time, Alan is instead focusing on the practices in Ancient China, Ancient Greece, and Egypt.

Until rather recently, every time a Russian crew went to space - from Yuri Gagarin’s first orbit to international crews traveling to the ISS, they’ve taken a gun along with them. This is the story of the incident that inspired them to design a special gun for space missions.

Just what freedoms are guaranteed by the 1st Amendment? It shouldn’t surprise you to learn that the right of freedom of speech is not absolute, but what are the exceptions? Alan breaks down the current and historical opinions on key free speech cases of the last century.

China is being misleading about what happened to Tiangong-1 and SpaceX has had a busy month, with more faring recovery news, selecting a location for the BFR factory, and more details on the Starlink constellation, and what the recent FCC approval might mean for the timeline of launching Starlink.

In the 1970s, telecommunications satellites being owned and operated entirely by private companies was still a relatively new phenomenon. The Communications Satellite Company argued that since it’s satellites were never in, or above California, they should not be subject to the state’s tax laws.

The first part of a series looking at cryptography and how it’s used. This week Kris is focusing on cryptographic hash algorithms and public key encryption, two technologies that power virtually every aspect of digital security.

If you want to launch a satellite to orbit, you need permission from the government. Not only for the launch, but also a license for the radio broadcasts to and from the satellite, and also to register an orbit. What happens if permission is denied, and you launch anyway? A U.S. based startup, Swarm Technologies, may be about to find out.

A grab bag of small stories from the last month: An award winning photograph of an atom, Space X’s Starlink satellites and faring recovery attempt, and more cool discoveries about exoplanets.

We attempt to answer a listener’s question about whether a one way trip to Mars could be considered assisted suicide, and we look at the rise and fall of Mars One, the originator of the one way trip to Mars.