So you're suggesting spending years and lots of money trying to prove that the tailing pond leak ruined your farm land while the mining company uses their experts to prove that the tailings were safe and of course they're willing to stretch the court case and appeals out for years. Meanwhile your land is worthless, the bank (that has investments in the mine) won't give you a loan and you have no way to make a living.
Or as was the case one place I lived, by the time it was obvious that arsenic was leaking into the river, the mine (actually they were reprocessing tailings) owners had moved to Bermuda.

Actually in cases like Grizzlies and Polar bears, they do breed naturally in cases like currently where due to climate change, their habitats are now overlapping. Then there are cases like Wolves and Coyotes where the Coyote has extended its range into Wolf territory and there is now interbreeding.
Populations get separated, evolve in different directions and at some point become different species. It's happened before with Humanity where the Neanderthal was a sub-species or separate species depending on how you measure and if current populations of Humanity had stayed separate, would have happened again as it was happening. An Inuit is much better evolved for cold then an African.
Species is actually more of a spectrum thing and our labeling pretty arbitrary.

I've been involved in the OS/2 community where there has been projects along these lines, eg http://trac.netlabs.org/qt4 and http://trac.netlabs.org/java. Other examples include porting VLC where the community pledged X amount of money and someone did it under a different bounty system. There were failures under that system where there wasn't enough money raised for various projects to entice a developer and eventually the holder of the money polled the sponsors about what to do with the money and most was given to financing Firefox.
While porting the OpenJDK included corporate sponsorship and I suspect the current work on Firefox is also corporate sponsered, the community of regular users did supply a good portion of money.
There are also developers who just ask for donations and while not making a living this way, it does finance a hobby. (I've been offered quite a few donations over the years. As I didn't want to feel any

Note that the First Amendment only limited Congress, not the States or other smaller governments, or the courts. One question is that since it amended the Constitution, is Congress still allowed to limit speech with copyright (and other IP) laws?

Bounties. Communities can offer money to developers to develop and developers can offer to write stuff if given the funding.
This works the best if the community isn't too big or small and the developers have a good reputation.

Two points, one MS has always pretended to give away Windows for free, eg most every new computer comes with a free copy of Windows. While not true, it seems that way to the average buyer.
Two, 20 years ago MS actively encouraged copying Windows and users sharing those copies for free. Bill Gates actually said something along the lines of "it's better for people to use pirated copies of Windows then to buy the competitions software" and Win95 would actually install with a blank product key if it sensed OS/2 on the computer, and then inform the user that their OS/2 install was gone for good. (Actually 2 minutes with fdisk brought back their OS/2 install unless they let it get formatted away).
Win 3.x didn't even need a product key.

There's trademark law to cover franchises. eg James Bond is trademarked so no-one else can make a James Bond movie even when the books are out of copyright.

Well considering it lost money, perhaps we would be doing the investors in discouraging these scams.

There's enough for medical equipment and it isn't hard to make more (irradiate water to make tritium and let it decay). As for using it for fusion, it is much harder to fuse he3 then what they're currently experimenting with and they can't do it in an energy positive way with deuterium yet. Once we have working fusion reactors, then we can think about getting more he3.

That's only true from an accounting perspective. There's also other perspectives such as the perception of massive fraud which leads to the project losing support. It may be worth more then $100 million to show the public/congress that fraud won't be tolerated and by discouraging future fraud may still save money long term.
The same can be true for other forms of waste but fraud is something that people really don't like and even spending money to prove that fraud does not exist can help the project as perception is important.

While I'm sure Church scams are common (just have to turn on the TV on Sunday), my Mom was totally non-religious.

The problem is that at the beginning of senility, when the person is trying to hide it (from themselves as much as anyone), there are no care givers. My Mom managed to go through a few hundred thousand dollars just before she was diagnosed as senile. Where the money went, we don't know though we have suspicions about her neighbour.

Maybe this time Bill the Cat will win the Presidency. It would be an improvement compared to all the current candidates.

Well considering that there is only one Moon, which is the name of the natural satellite of the Earth, obviously Mars and Pluto don't have the Moon, and I'm pretty sure that there is a case of an asteroid having a satellite which itself has a satellite. As for the satellites of Mars being captured asteroids, that is very unlikely as they are in equatorial orbits. Which is another point against Pluto being a planet, the rest are in the equatorial plane of the Sun and don't have irregular orbits that cross a planets orbit. There are also satellites such as Titan that have a atmosphere, yet no one argues that Titan is a planet and then there is Mercury, no satellite nor any atmosphere to speak off.

The size of Pluto has been continuously revised downwards since it was discovered and considered the same size as Mercury (it's bright for its size). Just like Ceres lost its planet designation when it was better measured and it was realized it was one of many objects orbiting in the asteroid belt, so has Pluto.
I really don't understand why it matters, Pluto is still Pluto and lots of things we learned in school turned out to be different then we were taught.