Bootlegacy: Liz Nevis on intellectual and cultural property

Several authors, including an economics professor, are pretty sure they did. Even the snooty-booty New Yorker has noticed, although New York is far more famous for “corporate pirates” who would have been useful to their high-seas counterparts only as ballast or sharkbait. (BTW, many thanks to Keith Nagel, author of highly useful patent-perusal […]

OK, so you want to look for sunken treasure - be it monetary, historical, or both. (Or you find out someone else is doing it, you don’t think they should, and you want to see if you can stop them).
You’re in luck, sort of.
The bad news for underwater artifact-hunters is that unless […]

In Parts 1 and 2, we heard about the legal travails of Treasure Salvors, Inc., who found and salvaged the wreck of the Nuestra Senora de Atocha. But the curse of curios-in-curiae didn’t end there: even buying, owning, selling, or donating Atocha artifacts had legal ramifications.

As you’ll have seen in Part 1, the Atocha shipwreck salvage story is a humdinger. It has it all: adventure, wealth, greed, betrayal, violence . . . constitutional interpretation . . . civil procedure . . .
When you’re up to your a** in alligators (or allegations, or litigators), you may not notice the mosquitoes […]

This is me in 1994 with treasure hunter Mel Fisher, who salvaged the wreck of the Spanish treasure ship Nuestra Senora de Atocha. Mrs. Fisher customarily took pictures like these whenever a visitor to their Treasure Museum (now the Mel Fisher Maritime Heritage Museum) in Key West* bought a gold 8-reale coin […]