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U.S. trademark registration 4,473,631 was issued to one Paul Ingrisano, aka "Pi Productions Corp" of New York. In January, the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office gave Ingrisano a trademark on the symbol π. pi followed by a period: a design Ingrisano uses on T-shirts sold at some brick-and-mortar stores.
When Ingrisano discovered that California-based print-on-demand outlet Zazzle offered an array of clothing items that featured the symbol pi, he had his attorney send the company a strongly-worded cease-and-desist letter this month demanding their removal.
"This would be like McDonalds claiming the letter M as a trademark," wrote Jez Kemp, whose Zazzle store offers apparel imagining pi dressed in a pirate costume. "The trademark is in the combination of style and symbol, not the symbol itself."
Attorney Millet defends the cease-and-desist letter. He says that to his knowledge none of the designs sold through Zazzle included the exact trademark π. -- pi followed by a period -- but some of them were confusingly similar to his client's design.
In 2011, Ingrisano attempted to trademark "I<3" artnet reports, which was "published for opposition" in June 2013. Reebok's intellectual property watchdogs claimed in a December 14, 2013 "Notice of Opposition" that "I<3" is too close to comfort to its own "I3" trademark.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by edIII on Tuesday June 03 2014, @08:57PM
You don't need to get rid of all intellectual property. Copyrights, patents, and trademarks are not intrinsically evil instruments for society.
In fact, trademarks are one of the few things that can last hundreds of years. There is some public interest in maintaining consumer confidence that if you walked into a McDonald's with all the signs, colors, materials, and products practically matching that it is in fact McDonald's.
That's a fast food restaurant, but flip it around and let's talk about the Electronic Frontier Foundation. It's in our best interests to prevent people from walking around with the logo and business cards loudly promulgating the views of fundamentalist Islam. Yes, people are stupid for confusing them, but the stupid people will be with us forever just like the poor. Visions of Utopia aside.
The problem is not the instruments themselves that ostensibly are for our betterment, but the government that is regulating it. It's beyond idiocy to have granted this man a trademark on two mathematical symbols together. All you find with such a mark is oppression and the strong legal motivation to sue everyone in existence. That bears some emphasis, as in order to protect a trademark you are forced by law to 'defend it or lose it'. The Krabby Patty with a recognizable greedy curmudgeon? Not so much. Who is oppressed because they are forbidden to open up a hamburger stand with that name and branding?
This stems from a simple fact that Americans have been asleep at the wheel for decades and have let corporations start to run things with the barest pretense of democracy or upholding the interests of the people. You don't need to swing all the way to the opposite end of the spectrum with its own issues.
Just come back to the center and we will be fine.
Technically, lunchtime is at any moment. It's just a wave function.
(Score: 4, Interesting) by TrumpetPower! on Tuesday June 03 2014, @11:33PM
Yeah...no.
If you're small fry, either nobody is going to want to steal your reputation, or you're not going to have the resources to go policing any possible infraction and possibly not even the blatant ones. It's useless for the masses, only for the corporate elite. And, as we see here, the corporate elite pretty much just use it to piss on everybody else without providing any real benefit to anybody but themselves.
In this day and age, were we to get rid of trademarks, you'd see the corporate elite instantly set up their own private verification services -- and, indeed, they've already got them in place. Not sure if that McDonald's is genuine or an upstart? Just check their Web site or download their social cloud geolocation app.
That's assuming you care whether it's genuine or not. So long as the food inspectors give the joint a passing grade, the worst that can happen is that the menu or service isn't what you were expecting. If you're a local, you're not going to care which out-of-country megacorp the profits from your purchase go to; you're just going to decide if you'll go back or not based on the exact same criteria you would with any other restaurant. If you're on the road and you want the consistency allegedly offered by the big chains, you'll take the ten seconds to check the official listing.
Really, that's all that it comes down to. Get rid of government protection for trademarks, and anybody who gives a damn will just take a moment to confirm that the person or establishment is "legit" by checking with whoever is responsible for the brand. Claim you're somebody you're not and either you're quickly discovered as a liar and a fraud by those who care, and those who don't care...don't care.
Look at the thriving counterfeit industry, especially in fashion. That you can buy a cheap knockoff purse with some special logo on it hasn't hurt sales of the official owner of that logo. The person buying knows it's fake and doesn't care. The only real benefit is to the lawyers, corrupt customs agents, and the like. And remind me why we're protecting their jobs...?
Cheers,
b&
All but God can prove this sentence true.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by edIII on Wednesday June 04 2014, @01:34AM
Overall, you have some interesting points, but I have to take issue with some of them.
Your first statement doesn't make sense. On one hand you say that being small has intrinsic defensive benefits, and on the other hand you say it doesn't matter because the the small person couldn't defend himself anyways. Roughly translated, "You're fucked, man"
From my own personal experience the first part is incorrect. A rather famous chain of Mexican restaurants in Houston, TX was started by an illegal immigrant (may be true) selling her tamales from her own back porch in violation of city ordinances. Overtime she became famous at the street level, as every Houstonian knows you are in a constant search for the best food. As an aside, Houston is a culinary mecca in the US and easily one of the top 3 IMHO cities for food. She worked very hard and made a name for herself.
Consider for a moment you were an enterprising elite with access to capital at fair rates. You could easily just lie and brand your restaurant, or series of tamale food trucks with her brand. I think you overestimate just how much people care to verify information or sources. Average people tend to go with what is in front of them at the moment. This elite can capitalize on and exploit this woman's admirable effort to create something for herself. I would submit that we would both wish to reward hard works and efforts.
On to the matter of resources and being useless to the masses, I think you are very incorrect. If we go back 150 years to the Wild West, you could apply your argument to any number of situations including murder. Having some civilized order in society is not a bad thing. Guess what we have today? Strong deterrents like widely available access to communications, 911, and CSI investigations. The resources are largely free, ignoring taxation for the moment, and freely accessible to all regardless of the state of your taxation.
So the elite never even attempted to exploit the old woman in the first place because the deterrent was real, and that was a matter of trademark law (among others). It's not so high of a barrier either to access those resources. A retainer fee for a modestly competent lawyer would have only been a few grand, and she is a small business owner remember. Plenty of lawyers are willing to take such things on contingency. What does she care if the lawyer gets all the money? She just wants a cease & desist to result in actual ceasing and desisting.
It's especially true today with the power of social media. I no longer shop at Staples because their shit head CEO decided to be "butthurt" about ObamaCare and lowered everyone's hours to 29 to not have to offer medical care to pregnant women in his employ. Despite the fact that the increase only cost a percentage of his near $50 million compensation package across only 4 years.
This assumes they have an interest in doing so, but it's a very good idea at least superficially. Keep in mind that you are just shifting the expenditure of resources from one supporting business sector to another one. It's not as if you got rid of it. Your idea does have some merit in that it removes the often predatory legal maneuvers that are arguably quite damaging to a free market.
The analogy in history would have been guilds. If you wished for high quality product you sought out a member in a reputable guild. The guild itself was self policing, and a customer could go direct to the guild, lodge a complaint, and show poor craftsmanship. Of course, this was in a day and age where we had apprentices and quality mattered. Not the absolute cheapest fabrication costs only designed to keep a product operational till planned obsolescence.
It does hurt sales of the owner of the mark. The argument is whether they are deserving of legal protection as it's in the best interests of society to do so. Notice I don't say the corporation. They're not people regardless of what some corrupt politicians want us to think. Is it of interest to protect the owner?
I would argue that it is, and there is interest in protecting the consumer. Some consumers do actually care about the brand name in a very superficial and shallow way (read:vanity), but some are also interested for humanitarian reasons such as an EFF t-shirt. I would be incredibly pissed off if I purchased an EFF t-shirt and the proceeds didn't go at all towards them.
OTOH, If I all I wanted was a t-shirt with Mickey Mouse on it, I don't give two craps if the money goes to Disney or not. Take something not as strongly associated with a brand name like a wolf howling at the moon.
What you want is the Roman system of Caveat emptor. It sounds great on the surface. Who doesn't want to turn back the tides on this touchy-feely-check-your-privilege-victim-society we have? People should have personal responsibility and Caveat emptor is not a nanny state by any stretch of the imagination.
It's a two edge sword though, especially in today's environment. Information Asymmetry. It was easier back then to determine the quality and worth of an item. Under Caveat Emptor there are ways in which the consumer can be lied to that are not eligible for remediation. At least, you would find just as many legal arguments after the fact. Caveat emptor does not result in a system that is measurably better on the whole. It has it's own detractions WRT to consumer protections.
What does that have to do with brand names anyways? Not so much, but it does have an awful lot to do with marks regarding membership to modern "guilds" if you will. Stating that you meet the standards of something by misappropriating a mark indicative of FOSS could be an example. Saying your tablet is endorsed by the EFF with their mark is another.
If there is one thing we agree on though, is that something must be changed now for the betterment of consumer protections. Perhaps there is a middle ground.
(Score: 2, Interesting) by fnj on Wednesday June 04 2014, @02:39AM
OK, I found mcdonald.com, mcdonalds.com, macdonald.com, macdonalds.com, bigmac.com, and a whole shit load of .org, .net and .biz variations. They all have the yellow arches and each one looks like it might be the "real" one, but they each have different restaurant lists. Which is the real one? Come to think of it, what does "real" mean, anyway? Some of them are saying to be careful because some of the others are serving poison and most of the others are serving shit.
In a world without working brand recognition, the word "counterfeit" doesn't exist. UL listed? Which UL? I got a scary letter from unitedstates.gov. Is that the real USA or some troll?
Seriously, I can't believe that I seem to be arguing that there is a place for some kind of IP. Somebody help me. Is there a way to make its complete banishment sound like less of a hell than I am imagining?
(Score: 2) by edIII on Thursday June 05 2014, @06:38AM
I'll take a crack at it. Yes, there is way.
First, copyrights, patents, and trademarks are not on the same team, not in the same ballpark, league, or game. Trademarks are a separate animal entirely. Copyrights and patents can be grouped into the same functional idea: "I made this. I own this. I can impose my will upon it".
It's import to recognize right away that the stated idea is absolute utter bullshit. In a civilization that has not developed the concept of intellectual property, they might even find it sociopathic, hostile, and/or not-in-harmony-with-the-group. Who knows how alien cultures might react to the concept that they can be controlled simply over a matter of non-tangible thought patterns.
Intellectual property is really a counter intuitive idea similar to using deadly poisons as an effective cure. So I would be hard pressed to say getting rid of intellectual property entirely is a descent into hell. I would say it's a move towards "normalcy", whatever that means in terms of a comparison of advanced civilizations and societies.
Getting rid of it is easier said and done, because that would require we also get rid of a lot of other pesky things about our nature. Everyone has to find a way to eat every single day, and our advanced society is nothing more than a complicated and sophisticated way of doing that. Put simply, everyone needs to freakin paid. Everyone has their dreams.
Intellectual property is just our pragmatism at work, and is not inherently bad. It's a rather simple and beautiful idea really. TEMPORARY control is granted so the person can get paid. That's it, and anything beyond that such as imposing your value judgement is forbidden. You don't get to tell people what to do with your art in their homes, or ever really. Most importantly, it's like a guest who has overstayed his welcome. Disney would have been kicked out of the party by now with a restraining order on the way. Consider it in the same category as tipping your waiter. If you don't want to tip that much, go to a different restaurant.
It needs to be regarded as not property, but privilege. Privileges can be revoked, temporary, and subject to review and modification at a moment's notice depending on how we want them. Property is a much more emotional issue where the ideals of freedom are conflated with the reality that a privilege is not the same thing as a right.
So at the moment, it's the best thing we've got. At least, what we have all agreed to. We could just as easily choose to implement a hybrid system where all copyrighted works or patents past 2020 fall under the new experiment.
In a true utopia there would be no intellectual property, but then again, the world would not be overflowing with greedy, manipulative, sociopathic assholes. We wouldn't have Wall Street either.
Now, trademarks are different. Trademarks are really about establishing a central authority for authentication and identification. The US government is the central authority, and if you counterfeit their stuff, they will put you in Federal Pound Me In The Ass Prison. Well that extends to allowing registered individuals to plea for a protected mark that is backed up by the strength and reputation of the government.
This is not the same thing as intellectual property at all. It's a precise legal agreement with the US government that you're the only one that gets to use it. It's not property again, it's privilege. Recognize it as such and it's not a bad thing really.
As the other poster suggested, it might be a good idea to look into decentralized and community based approaches to accomplish that same amount of authentication and identification we want. Maybe it's all encrypted to all hell and we are just using NFC hardware to read encrypted tags in products and establishments that reveal true identity?
We invent a system like that and who gives a shit if you have a McDonald's sign in the backyard. Anyone can point their smart device at it and see you are full of shit and they can deride you appropriately.
No, it's not a descent into hell at all to envision a world without intellectual property. Just address the base needs in a different way that works. We have plenty of ideas I'm sure already. At least, that sounds like the scientific approach.
(Score: 2) by HiThere on Wednesday June 04 2014, @12:53AM
Your points have a certain degree of validity, but I actually think that EFF is too short a combination of common themes to deserve a copyright. Copyrights should be required to be at least 5 (unicode) characters long and not in common use for any purpose OR to be a graphic image of similar information complexity. It should be legal to for the owner of a trademark to use them in combination with other information. So, e.g., "TheEFF" would be a valid symbol to trademark, as would "The EFF", and "-EFF-", etc.
As for "Americans have been asleep at the wheel for decades", if you think that, you haven't been paying attention. (Granted as local channels for media have been put under centralized control, protests have been marginalized, trivialized, and ignored. They have happened. They are still happening. I was recently at a City Hall meeting where the council was proposing an action that had people speaking against it for over 5 hours with only one person speaking in favor of it. The council put off deciding for a week. The next week there was another marathon of people speaking against it. Finally they adopted a trimmed down version of the proposal that is, unfortunately, ripe for quiet expansion. That was hundreds of people (all that would fit in the city council chamber) putting in about 20 hours each, with the result that they weren't TOTALLY ignored.
If you've got a more effective approach to take, I'd like to hear it.
Javascript is what you use to allow unknown third parties to run software you have no idea about on your computer.
(Score: 2) by edIII on Wednesday June 04 2014, @01:53AM
I'm going to double down on the asleep at the wheel statement. What will finally impress this cynic over here is when we have a 10 million man march on the White House to protest *anything*. It's not like we don't have a laundry list of extremely valid grievances that have nothing to do with religion. So many problems that are bipartisan really, but the Democratic and Republican leaders keep people fighting amongst themselves. It's not bipartisan at all, and it's just the elites effectively hiding behind strong appeals to emotion while Congress is forced to provide service to a much larger and varied group where might makes right as a matter of principle. Who has the most money...
Well.... that sounds like being asleep. If you had any critical thinking skills at all you would give the finger to both of them and be on the way to march on the capitol. Or worse... the moment you get everyone together the devolve into a bunch of drunk retarded monkeys flinging their poo and the movement is hijacked by people who pull a Kanye and "I'm gonna let you finish". It's all just a bunch of screaming back and forth that solves nothing.
I would see a huge amount of us get together in solidarity with a strict agreement to keep it to only Net Neutrality, or only the dismantling of the NSA and the intelligence apparatus of the US that has done orders more damage to our economy than terrorists over the next 10 years.
That many people in the room, while somewhat admirable doesn't impress me or the city council. What would impress them is having the police tell them that they brought in extra officers to handle the parking and traffic and that 5,000 people are outside the building. When a member of the council has a tangible problem getting home physically, they might take it seriously.
As for the EFF, I meant a mark WRT to their logo. I'm in full agreement about the three letters not being deserving of a mark. Personally, I don't think letters themselves are deserving of protection as they can be used to stifle free speech.
Technically, lunchtime is at any moment. It's just a wave function.