‘Buy Nothing’ Was Their Everything. Then Came the Trademark Troubles.; The New York Times via The Seattle Times, November 16, 2025

  Emma Goldberg, The New York Times via The Seattle Times; ‘Buy Nothing’ Was Their Everything. Then Came the Trademark Troubles.

"“The decision to incorporate the Buy Nothing Project as a public benefit corporation came after years of rapid, grassroots growth,” Liesl Clark, the CEO of Buy Nothing, wrote in an email. “It became clear that to sustain this work, protect the integrity of the mission and continue to grow responsibly, we needed a formal structure.” 

Plenty of members of the local groups feel disgruntled about these top-down rules. But at the moment, many are particularly galled at the timing of the recent page takedowns.

“It’s anti the ethos of the whole idea of Buy Nothing to go around and start enforcing a trademark while we’re in the middle of a SNAP crisis,” said Aidan Grimshaw, one of the administrators of a San Francisco group that used the Buy Nothing name, referring to the federal government’s largest food-assistance program. “It feels like a sign of the times.” 

On Buy Nothing’s blog, the organization said that reviews of unregistered pages happen intermittently, unrelated to the news. “We understand that some removals have coincided with the rollback to federal SNAP benefits,” the statement read. “Timing of group removals is outside of our control, and no unregistered groups have been reported since the rollback began.” 

Clark, a filmmaker, and Rebecca Rockefeller, who had bounced between gigs and at points lived on food stamps, started the first Buy Nothing group in 2013. They were partly inspired by the sort of gifting economies that Clark saw while filming a documentary in the Himalayas. What began as a small Facebook group in Bainbridge Island, Washington, took off quickly, leading eventually to thousands more groups with millions of members. Participation in the groups ballooned during the pandemic, when people were confined to their homes and hungry for connection. In 2021, the two founders incorporated it as a public benefit corporation. 

Some members of the local groups complained that the creation of a new structure and new rules violated the loose and free spirit of the community. The administrators who run the San Francisco page were incensed when they received an email from Facebook on Oct. 30 informing them of their trademark infringement."

Louisiana considers radical step to counter high drug prices: Federal intervention; Washington Post, July 3, 2017

Carolyn Y. Johnson, Washington Post; Louisiana considers radical step to counter high drug prices: Federal intervention

"At [Louisiana’s health secretary Rebekah] Gee’s urging, Joshua Sharfstein, a professor of public health at Johns Hopkins University and a former Food and Drug Administration deputy commissioner, convened a meeting of health-policy specialists and economists. They advised that the state ask the federal government to intervene in a two-pronged approach: Gee should first ask the government to negotiate with a drug company and license a medication, in line with a recent recommendation by a committee from the National Academies.

At the same time, they advised Gee to pursue a harder-edged tactic, in case the voluntary approach did not work: Gee should ask the secretary of health and human services to invoke a century-old law that allows the government to use patents at a reasonable cost. The panel recommended a price as low as $1,000 per patient.

The law was used routinely in the 1950s and 1960s to make medicines available at lower prices. It was considered but not used during the anthrax attacks in 2001. It has been used by more than 10 government agencies or departments to lower the prices for patented inventions, including night-vision goggles for the Defense Department.

“The drug has been out for years, and we’re failing to provide it to the majority of people who have this infection,” Gee said. “We’re failing at our mission to improve the public health, and so just doing what we’re doing is not an option and we have to do better.”"

Copyright Register: IT outage shows why agency must modernize; FedScoop.com, 11/30/15

Whitney Blair Wyckoff, FedScoop.com; Copyright Register: IT outage shows why agency must modernize:

"U.S. Register of Copyrights Maria Pallante still grimaces at the mention of a major IT outage that struck her agency this summer.

What started as routine data center maintenance shuttered critical Library of Congress IT systems — including those at the Copyright Office — for nine days. Pallante said it forced her staff, who were unable to fix the problems directly, to field angry calls from customers unable to register their songs, books or other creative works online.

“This is an illustration of the fact that my IT, and my databases, are in the hands of people who are not statutorily responsible for that information,” she told FedScoop, speaking in a Copyright Office conference room lined with the portraits of past registers. She added, "I just really feel that people who work on Copyright Office IT should be in the Copyright Office, in the mission, working side by side with the other experts."

It’s a point alluded to in the Copyright Office's five-year strategic modernization plan, finalized and released Tuesday. The 65-page document includes overarching goals that span from building a robust and flexible technology enterprise to recruiting a diverse workforce. But woven into the report is the need to tailor the office's technology to the needs of the people it serves.

“I think the main message of this is that the Copyright Office has to be directly involved in technology — for one, we can’t administer the law without having control of tools to allow us to do that,” said Pallante, who spent nearly 10 years as intellectual property counsel and director of the licensing group at the Guggenheim Museums before coming to her current job in 2011."

The White House’s first chief data scientist is no stranger to Washington; Washington Post, 3/29/15

Amrita Jayakumar, Washington Post; The White House’s first chief data scientist is no stranger to Washington:

"DJ Patil, who was named the nation’s first chief data scientist last month, shares credit for coining the term “data science.” He is the latest Silicon Valley transplant to join the Obama administration, working under former Google executive Megan Smith, the White House’s chief technology officer...

Q. What does the first chief data scientist do?

A. To me, the government says, “Okay, we have data, but how do we use that responsibly to create efficiencies, to create transparency, to unlock economic potential? How do we get that data to preserve American competitiveness and advance innovation?”

The mission of this role is an amplification of things that have been happening.

How will you achieve those goals?

There are three areas where we have the biggest chance to succeed in our mission...

The next one is open data. We’ve got data.gov [a Web site that features machine-readable government data], which has really changed the game. Think about the billions of dollars that rest on open data infrastructure. People do research on that data, that research turns into insight, that insight turns into wisdom and that wisdom is put back into models and scientific results. The foundation of all this is open data. How do we enhance that across-the-board?"