Felix Salmon has a great piece responding to a WSJ puff piece on the American trademark troll company that has stolen the name “Ugg boot” then used “intellectual property” laws to impose the absurd claim that the only genuine Uggs are those made in China.
The world would be better off if intellectual property were abolished, or at least scaled back to the more modest claims of the 19th century. The attempts of the US government to defend IP monopoly rights in their most extreme form are one of the many reasons American “soft power” is such a perishable commodity.
{ 84 comments }
Digger 09.15.10 at 5:12 am
John, Agree about abolishing IP. The most distressing aspect to me is patenting seeds, in some instances ones our grandparents grew and saved seed from freely. Engdahl’s interview in Acres USA was excellent on this: http://www.engdahl.oilgeopolitics.net/GMO/gmo.html
Also thought Kevin Carson’s writing on patents noteworthy: http://www.mutualist.org/id4.html (halfway down the page)
The number of useful health therapies that are mostly unknown because they cannot be patented and marketed exclusively is likely astronomical.
Michael Hudson calls it the tollbooth economy, a most apt description. http://neweconomicperspectives.blogspot.com/2009/12/lost-science-of-classical-political.html & http://michael-hudson.com/
Lemuel Pitkin 09.15.10 at 5:16 am
The world would be better off if intellectual property were abolished
Right, exactly.
Coopers Green 09.15.10 at 5:39 am
The original Ugg boots were hand made in Australia NOT USA or China!!!!
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ugg_boots
Salient 09.15.10 at 6:06 am
The world would be better off if intellectual property were abolished, or at least scaled back to the more modest claims of the 19th century.
I’d drink to the former in principle, and agree amenably to the latter in practice. To be even more provocative: would replacing ‘intellectual property’ in that sentence with ‘corporate charter’ make it substantially less true?^1^
[JQ: These hard-bright-line stances you’re staking out on CT lately are awesome. Also enjoyable as counterbalance to the libertarian wack-a-mole posts on CT.]
^1^I might mean ‘corporate personhood’ instead. I can’t decide.
novakant 09.15.10 at 6:16 am
The world would be better off if intellectual property were abolished, or at least scaled back to the more modest claims of the 19th century.
Abandoning intellectual property is a crazy idea – the “modest claims” of the 19th century, i.e. the Paris and Berne conventions weren’t modest, but the foundation of current property law.
novakant 09.15.10 at 6:21 am
Btw, I take it there is a typo this page (“£12.71”) and there should be a link to a free ebook download instead, right?
Nick 09.15.10 at 7:27 am
Agreed. And it’s not necessarily hypocritical to make use of an institution that should be reformed or abolished. I’ll call the police if I’m a victim of crime. Doesn’t mean I’ll condone the fact they can get away with killing people extra-judicially now and then.
alex 09.15.10 at 7:27 am
IP seems not to be the problem, but rather blatant lies about origination vs ‘ownership’ thereof being accepted by courts without so much as a whimper.
otto 09.15.10 at 7:43 am
Given the popularity if Ugg boots in Dublin, I think I will count this as a ‘Wild Geese’ post at Crooked Timber.
nick s 09.15.10 at 8:07 am
I suppose that Salmon has a point about the WSJ compromising its journalistic integrity here, but it’s also a testament how the tangible distinction between “broadsheet newspaper” and “glossy supplement filled with thinly disguised promotional guff written in exchange for ad revenue and freebies” only persists online if the paper pays its designers to wrap the advertorial in a Flash slideshow or something similar.
(The intellectual property dynamic used to be fairly simple: pirate like mad when you’re importers, then go after pirates when you’re exporters. That it has evolved to the point where you can pirate under the cover of one jurisdiction — ideally a big one like the US — then trademark your piracy and smother the people you ripped off… is a testament to something Thomas Friedman heard in a cab once.)
John Quiggin 09.15.10 at 8:26 am
@Novakant. Actually, I practise what I preach (at least in this respect). There is a near-final text available free at zombiecon.wikidot.com, and virtually all of the book has already been posted here at CT. The Amazon price gets you the elegantly produced paper or e-book version from Princeton UP – it would be a bargain even at list price.
Keir 09.15.10 at 8:58 am
It should be noted Prof. Quiggin earns a very nice salary from the University of Queensland, and is able to do things like give away books. Not all authors are so lucky, and I think it’d be a worse world if all authors had to be.
zamfir 09.15.10 at 10:08 am
Salmon’s case rests.on the assumption that pre-Decker ugg boots had a good reputation that Decker hijacked. But outside of Australia, that seems dubious.
That there even is a market outside of Australia for Australian ugg boots is mostly the work of Decker’s marketing. If Decker had called them Deggs, there would have been little doubt that Australian companies cannot name their boots Deggs.
there does seems to be a some argument possible that a word can be generic in one place, and a specific name in another.
Emma in Sydney 09.15.10 at 10:16 am
Keir @ 10 — most writers of any kind, and the vast majority of writers in history have made their salary doing something else. Anthony Trollope worked for the Post office for decades. A vanishingly small fraction get very rich and some make a living, but most would probably be better off to give their books away. They’d certainly have more readers. Any academic writer who tried to live on the proceeds of publishing would be very hungry, very soon.
Bill Benzon 09.15.10 at 10:39 am
At least one film-maker, Nina Paley, seems to be doing alright by giving her film away. You can download it for free, all 82 minutes of it, which is five years out of her life. The story’s a long and complicated one, which Nina has told a bazillion times (links off the QCO link above). She’s also done a series of cartoon strips touching on matters of IP.
John Quiggin 09.15.10 at 11:22 am
@Keir As I indicated in the post, I don’t have a problem with the C19 model of 14 year copyrights.
@Zamfir I don’t buy this at all. Assuming that “apple pie” was purely American, should an Australian company be able trademark it everywhere outside the US. I have no problem with Decker selling Ugg boots under that name, only with them trying (successfully) to stop the original makers from doing the same thing.
Your point about Deggs makes the case even clearer – if they had used that name and trademarked it, no one would have a problem, so the fact that they didn’t proves that they are thieves/trolls.
Marcus Pivato 09.15.10 at 12:30 pm
It is important to recognize that copyrights and patents are very different than trademarks. Copyrights and patents exist to reward an original or innovative creation. Trademarks have nothing to do with this. Trademark law exists to stop one producer from stealing the identity and reputation of another. Levi Strauss & co has worked hard to establish a reputation for making good blue-jeans. If I sell fake `Levi’ jeans, then I am stealing this reputation. In the end, the consumer is the victim, because consumers rely on brand recognition as an indicator of quality. So trademark law is (or should be) about consumer protection. Trademark violation is a form of false advertising. Note that this argument has nothing to do with rewarding creative or innovative work —it is not like Levi Strauss & Co. has a patent on blue jeans.
In short, one can reject the arguments for patents and copyrights, and still accept the need for trademark law —or vice versa.
The problem is that trademark law is applied in situations where this justification doesn’t apply. For example, it is obviously inappropriate to allow a company to trademark a generic term. It is also inappropriate to use trademarks as a sort of `blanket copyright’ over anything to do with a literary character. (e.g. `Mickey Mouse’ is my trademark, so you can’t write any stories or draw any pictures of Mickey Mouse without my permission). This has nothing to do with consumer protection.
Keir 09.15.10 at 12:33 pm
Er. No. You said the world would be better off if copyright were abolished, or, at least scaled back to C19 levels. If I were to say that I would like taxes abolished, or at least scaled back to C19 levels, I wouldn’t mean I don’t have a problem with C19 levels of taxation.
PS: Any academic writer who tried to live on the proceeds of publishing would be very hungry, very soon.
Textbook writers.
Zamfir 09.15.10 at 1:23 pm
JQ, don’t get me wrong. I think something is wrong, but I can’t put my finger on the exact problem, on the implicit or explicit rule that is broken here.
As Marcus Pivato above says, the main reason to have trademarks is to protect identity and reputation. Salmon says that Decker has hijacked the reputation of uggs and is getting away with it. But in most countries, ugg boots didn’t have a reputation. They have one now, and it is associated with Decker.
So what rule was broken by trademarking the name? That Uggs actually did have a reputation or identity in the new countries, with as evidence that otherwise Decker would have chosen a name of their own? Or that you shouldn’t be able to trademark a name if it is already in use elsewhwere in the world?
As a hypothetical: what if Decker had trademarked the name by accident for a different kind of boot, without realizing that the name was already in use elsewhere. Would that make their trademark legitimate? The answer there still seems yes to me, and in such a case it seems reasonable that Australian sellers would have to change the names of their boots in the US.
dsquared 09.15.10 at 1:43 pm
Or that you shouldn’t be able to trademark a name if it is already in use elsewhwere in the world?
bingo
As a hypothetical: what if Decker had trademarked the name by accident for a different kind of boot, without realizing that the name was already in use elsewhere. Would that make their trademark legitimate?
It would quite likely invalidate it and certainly cause all sorts of problems. Most famous example of this is Anheuser Busch and the Budejowicky Budvar brewery’s right to call their beer “Budweiser”, because they brew it in Cesky Budejovice.
Marcus Pivato 09.15.10 at 2:09 pm
Keir@18, in response to the comment, “PS: Any academic writer who tried to live on the proceeds of publishing would be very hungry, very soon,”’ writes: “Textbook writers.”
To be precise, Keir, you should amend that to `writers of first-year service course textbooks’. The royalties from textbooks in more advanced and specialized courses are generally chump change. Many authors don’t write textbooks for the money, since they are already highly paid as university professors, and the marginal revenue from the textbook is hardly worth the Herculean effort of writing it. An academic textbook author is often intrinsically motivated —she has a certain vision of how the subject `should be taught’, or she is tired of teaching out of mediocre texts and thinks she could do a better job herself. Some texts just evolve out of years of incrementally improved lecture notes. In some relatively new fields, there is simply no definitive exposition, and `someone has to write one’. If the author has a crass financial motive at all, it is not usually from the royalty payments —it is from the enhancement of her prestige and professional reputation, which has long-term payoff.
Zamfir@19:
As Marcus Pivato above says, the main reason to have trademarks is to protect identity and reputation. Salmon says that Decker has hijacked the reputation of uggs and is getting away with it. But in most countries, ugg boots didn’t have a reputation. They have one now, and it is associated with Decker.</em
Note that I specifically excluded the trademarking of a `generic' term, which it seems is exactly what Decker has done in this case. To make an analogy: suppose I am a bright young capitalist in the remote and backward country of Ultima Thule, and one day I learn that far away, in a place called Italia, they make this food by extruding finely milled semolina paste into thin strings. They call it, spaghetti. `I know,’ I say, `I will start selling this spaghetti product here in Ultima Thule, and I will trademark the name Spaghetti (R) so that no one else can sell it under that name here. Also, if any Italian `counterfeiters’ come here to Ultima Thule and try to sell extruded semolina paste under `Spaghetti’ or any similar name (e.g. `Spa Getty’, `spog eddie’, etc.), I will sue them for trademark infringement.”
I think we can all agree this would be an abuse of the trademark system. The case of `Ugg’ boots is no different.
(In fact, in his article, Salmon makes an exactly parallel analogy involving French Laguiole knives. Then he learned that in fact, a trademark troll has appropriated the Laguiole name in exactly this fashion.)
nick s 09.15.10 at 2:19 pm
Most famous example of this is Anheuser Busch and the Budejowicky Budvar brewery’s right to call their beer “Budweiserâ€, because they brew it in Cesky Budejovice.
This taps somewhat into protected geographical status, which is both like and unlike a trademark, in that it is designed to protect dilution, but is also aimed at preventing a single commercial entity from overall control of the designation. (Theoretically, Danone could buy a controlling stake in all the Roquefort producers, but it couldn’t prevent any new ones.) The US is, of course, notoriously two-faced about PGS as well.
Zamfir 09.15.10 at 2:21 pm
What’s the outcome of the Budweiser case? Is there a legal principle that allows Ugg to be a trademark in the US, but not Budweiser? The cases seem pretty analogous
Over here the Czechs have a trademark right, but I don’t know if that is because they were original, or simply the first to claim it, or because they come from Budweis.
AntiAlias 09.15.10 at 2:45 pm
@ 14:
I don’t quite see how the fact most writers can’t make a living out of writing leads to the conclusion that they would be better off writing for free.
ogmb 09.15.10 at 3:07 pm
I think we can all agree this would be an abuse of the trademark system. The case of `Ugg’ boots is no different.
Uh, no. The trademark system recognizes something called territoriality. If you spend your advertising money in Ultima Thule to establish spaghettiâ„¢ as a tasty and healthy food and afterwards Barilla or De Cecco decide to enter the Ultimathulean market calling their own semolina noodles “spaghetti” there they’re free-riding on your efforts. That’s what trademark law is set up to prevent. It would only be an abuse if you think you can move into the Italian market claiming that since nobody bothered to trademark “spaghetti” there your Ultimathulean trademark gives you exclusivity in Italy as well.
zamfir 09.15.10 at 3:39 pm
But what does society gain from territoriality? Society might benefit from having clear identities with reputations, but that works exactly as well if you think up a new name, like Thuletti, or Deggs.
Marcus Pivato 09.15.10 at 3:43 pm
OGMB@25: Uh, no. The trademark system recognizes something called territoriality. If you spend your advertising money in Ultima Thule to establish spaghetti™ as a tasty and healthy food and afterwards Barilla or De Cecco decide to enter the Ultimathulean market calling their own semolina noodles “spaghetti†there they’re free-riding on your efforts. That’s what trademark law is set up to prevent.
My claim is that this is not what trademark law is set up to prevent. Trademark law is set up to enable producers to create and maintain a brand reputation, and to enable consumers to use brand reputation as a reliable indicator of quality. In the `spaghetti’ example, you could do that very easily by trademarking `OGMB spaghetti’, or even just `OGMB’. The key identifier here is `OGMB’, which is (presumably) not a generic term. It is entirely unnecessary (and it is pernicious) to trademark a generic term like `spaghetti’.
Your argument seems to be one of `property rights’ —i.e. `I invested time and money to advertise this product and create a reputation, and I own any economic benefits accruing from that reputation, and you are stealing that from me.’ This claim depends on a very particular interpretation of `property rights’. First of all, you cannot `own’ a generic word in the English (or Italian, or Australian) language, no matter how much money you spend advertising it. But what about a non-generic trademark like `OGMB’? Can you own that?
Trademark is a legal construct designed to improve the social efficiency of the market. Copyrights and patents are other legal constructs with a similar function. Are these forms of `property’? Perhaps in some extended sense. But it is not the same as physical property like the house you live in. Many of the reasons you would want to defend physical property rights (e.g. so the government can’t take away your house) do not really extend to government-enforced monopoly rights on certain economic activities (i.e. copyrights, trademarks, and patents). These monopoly rights may (or may not) enhance economic efficiency and provide a net social benefit. But to refer to these things as `property’ is to dilute the meaning of the term.
novakant 09.15.10 at 4:17 pm
Actually, I practise what I preach. There is a near-final text available free at zombiecon.wikidot.com, and virtually all of the book has already been posted here at CT.
Of course you did this purely as part of your commitment to the cause of abolishing intellectual property rights and I’m just an evil cynic for thinking that this move might also have something to do with targeted marketing and career advancement …
ogmb 09.15.10 at 4:24 pm
If nobody in Ultima Thule has ever heard of spaghetti before it’s not a generic term. Your claim is that because it is a generic term in Italy (and most everywhere else) the Ultimathulean PTO must acknowledge this genericness and deny the trademark application for “spaghetti”. But 1. this is not how it works, and 2. I don’t see how transferring genericness across national boundaries creates social efficiency.
First of all, you cannot `own’ a generic word in the English language
Trademark doesn’t give you ownership over a word. Rank Xerox can’t keep people from calling the use of a photomechanic copier “xeroxing”, it can only keep competitors from calling their own copiers Xerox machines.
Many of the reasons you would want to defend physical property rights (e.g. so the government can’t take away your house) do not really extend to government-enforced monopoly rights on certain economic activities.
Owning a house is just as much a government-enforced monopoly as owning a trademark. The differences between tangible assets and intellectual assets have more to do with technical excludability and divisibility than government enforcement and the right to exclude.
novakant 09.15.10 at 4:47 pm
What keir and Antialias said.
Re 15
Paley was a syndicated cartoonist, i.e. relying on IP and its enforcement for a living – anyway her position on copyright is this:
I completely support your right to copy-restrict your works. The more you copyright (restrict access to) your work, the more wide-open the field is for free culture like Sita Sings the Blues. Open-licensed work has a tremendous competitive advantage over copy-restricted work. So by all means, please “protect†your “property.â€
Tough I think she’s mistaken and really don’t like her tone, I can live with this: if you can support yourself financially through other sources, I won’t object to you giving away your work for free (though there is the issue of destroying the market by working for free, e.g. the abuses of “working on spec” and 0″crowdsourcing”) as long as you let me enjoy my right to live off the proceeds of my work as well.
Salient 09.15.10 at 5:01 pm
Admittedly I’m a bit more sympathetic to novakant’s stance than I come across on copyright threads. In the ideal world in my own head, we’d have a universal basic income and guaranteed right-to-work, and recompense for creative works would operate in much the way Edward Bellamy proposed.
Given that we don’t have that, I could probably get behind some sort of “IP for individuals, but not for corporations or legal entities which are not a human being.” Which is why I said what I did in #4: it’s not unrelated: abuses of IP are generally perpetrated by corporate entities, not individuals, and at least IP abuse by an individual would end with the life of the author, instead of continuing for the life of a company…
Matt 09.15.10 at 5:14 pm
Salient- I really don’t think your issue is w/ corporations or companies as such. The vast majority of corporations are “closely held”, small, and not publicly traded. Sometimes they are essentially one person. And, many huge and even evil companies are privately held and not corporations at all. (Joseph Heath has a useful discussion of this sort of thing in his recent book _Filthy Lucre_ (or, in the U.S., where it was assumed people didn’t know what lucre was, _Economics without Illusions.) I think the way you’re framing the issue in relation to corporations or companies and the like doesn’t really get at what you’re interested in, and is mostly a distraction.
Henri Vieuxtemps 09.15.10 at 5:31 pm
I don’t quite see how the fact most writers can’t make a living out of writing leads to the conclusion that they would be better off writing for free.
What if the writer is paid very little by the publisher, who holds the copyright, and who also prices the book out of reach of writer’s intended audience. Would this scenario justify the statement “better off writing for free”?
tps12 09.15.10 at 6:24 pm
If they didn’t eat extruded semolina paste in Ultima Thule at all originally, then the upstarts are “free-riding on your efforts” regardless of what they call their product.
AntiAlias 09.15.10 at 6:51 pm
What if the writer is paid very little by the publisher, who holds the copyright, and who also prices the book out of reach of writer’s intended audience. Would this scenario justify the statement “better off writing for free�
No it won’t – it would justify the “screwed anyway” one. Which (wild guess) is the case with many a writer nowadays. What about making it available to the Intended Audience for a small fee in PDF form (i.e. autopublish)?
Don’t take me wrong, I do think writers are strangled in more than a way (being a novel writer in search for a publisher myself). At least in the Spanish market, I understand it’s distribution, not publishers, who’s getting the lion’s share. “So screw’em, just give it away for free” – I can sympathise with that. But then there’s a lot of people out there getting peanuts for their work – would we advise them to work for free?
chris 09.15.10 at 7:07 pm
I don’t see how transferring genericness across national boundaries creates social efficiency.
It prevents you from using your Ultimathulean trademark to harass multinational pasta merchants who happen to have an Ultimathulean branch, or worse, taking your Ultimathulean trademark to Italy and trying to enforce it _there_ (which is apparently what Decker is doing now w.r.t. Australian bootmakers). The Italian courts should of course laugh in your face but I’m not sure the relevant international treaties were written carefully enough to permit them to do so. (Or perhaps they were very carefully written to prevent them from doing so.)
If you wanted to build up your own brand name, build up your own brand name, don’t appropriate a generic term.
Henri Vieuxtemps 09.15.10 at 7:10 pm
@35, well, “better off writing for free” is your own phrasing; “better off if intellectual property were abolished” doesn’t necessarily mean “writing for free”. Some different mechanism, perhaps.
AntiAlias 09.15.10 at 7:42 pm
Well, Henri, you did ask me about that particular scenario, as I was replying to Emma @ 14 who said “giving them [books] away”. Now if you have an idea for a Different Mechanism which does not imply W4F, I’d love to hear about it, plus you win an Internet (hell, I’ll buy you a beer if it works!)
Henri Vieuxtemps 09.15.10 at 8:03 pm
I don’t, but it sounds like Salient @31 does. In any case, one idea is not enough, you need many; these things evolve by trial and error.
Salient 09.15.10 at 8:31 pm
I think the way you’re framing the issue in relation to corporations or companies and the like doesn’t really get at what you’re interested in, and is mostly a distraction.
I suspect you’re correct. Any thoughts as to how to get at what I’m really interested in, which is [a] making creative work as widely available as possible to recipient human beings, while [b] protecting the livelihood of ‘human beings who produce creative things’ while denying those same protections to human-like legal entities which are literally incapable of producing creative things, and which must employ human beings to do that work?
I’d rather have knowledge, broadly speaking to mean stuff like creative works, be publicly owned. And I’d definitely like to see the human beings who produce valuable knowledge be rewarded appropriately for the knowledge they produce (whatever that means — I don’t care to define ‘valuable’ or ‘appropriately’ at all prescriptively).
What I would like to avoid, most of all, is a situation in which a company is able to acquire competitive advantage through the deployment of R&D (where R&D is defined loosely as “internally producing stuff which was designed or created or conceptualized in-house and then restricting access and usage of the relevant knowledge to others via IP law.”)
Yes, I realize this somewhat blows up the established R&D system. But I’m more interested in an alternative system for funding R&D, including if necessary a new system for private investment in R&D, than I am in preserving a system in which R&D produces competitive advantage, which strikes me as a worst-case scenario. [Company A designs X, Company B designs Y. X and Y would work great together, but A and B are competitors.]
n. that my use of ‘creative work’ is basically tautologically to mean ‘anything that could or should be subject to IP law, if we have IP law’
Lemuel Pitkin 09.15.10 at 8:37 pm
I don’t quite see how the fact most writers can’t make a living out of writing leads to the conclusion that they would be better off writing for free.
It does, tho.
Copyright imposes larger costs on writers than anyone else. First, because it limits the number of people who see their work. Everyone has to eat, but above some reasonable income I don’t know a single serious writer who wouldn’t prefer a bigger audience to a bigger paycheck at the margin. Second, because the main people copyright is enforced against, are other creators. If I want to listen to some copyrighted song without paying for it, it’s trivially easy to do so. On the other hand, if I want to record and distribute my own version of the song, copyright restrictions may be quite effective in pre3enting me from doing so. Or consider the case in the OP: the big loser here is not boot consumers, but other boot makers. It’s impossible to create anything without infringing on someone else’s “intellectual property,” if the latter is defined broadly enough; so the broader IP becomes, the harder life gets from creators.
Against these costs, we have the income writers and other creators receive from copyright. We can discuss other ways of providing that income. (There are lots of alternatives.) But as a simple matter of logic, if most writers are getting little if any of the benefit, but are continuing to pay the costs, then most writers would be better off if we scrapped the whole thing.
Akshay 09.15.10 at 8:53 pm
Nina Paley’s acerbic views are surely the result of her run-in with the Mickey Mouse Law, which extends copyright backwards to depression-era products. (In her case, jazz songs) Anyway, her film is wonderful and will be appreciated by all! *Go buy it NOW!*
PS While the main purpose of my comment is to praise Paley’s moviemaking, on my interpretation JQ is saying abolishing IP would be better than the current situation, not that it would be the best of all possible worlds. Since the current situation includes gene patents, organism patents, biopiracy, the most trivial software patents, vast rents for pharma, etc. etc, I find that claim believable. The system is broken and primarily creates vast barriers to entry and enormous rents for firms well endowed with lawyers.
AntiAlias 09.15.10 at 10:25 pm
Lemuel Pitkin @ 41:
Everyone has to eat, but above some reasonable income I don’t know a single serious writer who wouldn’t prefer a bigger audience to a bigger paycheck at the margin.
Yes, count me in, I’d rather have double the readership and half the money – but the crux of the argument is the “reasonable income” bit. Lots of people making irreasonabl[ly low] income, unfortunately. Besides, if conditions are bad, I’d like to try and improve them, rather than get all defeatist and just give it away because I’d earn shit anyway. For instance, do [insert Henri’s Different Mechanism(c) here].
[…] the main people copyright is enforced against, are other creators. If I want to listen to some copyrighted song without paying for it, it’s trivially easy to do so.
I agree it is as easy to steal .txt or .pdf books as it is with .mp3 songs – but then the problem is not copyright itself, but its lack of enforcement regarding final users (reader/listerners), isn’t it?
But sorry, I don’t see life becoming harder for Creator B because he can’t use Creator A’s creations, but instead for Creator A in the first place because she can’t get the money she deserves for her creations. I’m not whining because I can’t plagiarise another guy, but because someone’s enjoying my work without paying. (And please notice I’m talking about the creator him/herself, not the corporation – hence the need for the DifMec).
lemmy caution 09.15.10 at 11:03 pm
The Wikipedia page does a good job in explaining the trademark situation:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ugg_boots
Ugg boots is a generic term in Australia but not in the US and Denmark.
Lemuel Pitkin 09.15.10 at 11:19 pm
AntiAlias,
We’re discussing what the rules should be. To use terms like “steal” and “plagiarize” is to beg the question.
Salient 09.15.10 at 11:31 pm
Yes, count me in, I’d rather have double the readership and half the money – but the crux of the argument is the “reasonable income†bit.
This. This. This. It all comes down to making sure creative folks are financially secured. Which would be provided / should be provided by universal basic income. Which is a major, major selling point for universal basic income: it funds individual innovation. A debate over IP reform ought to evolve into a debate over how we fund and support individuals who seek to make a creative contribution to the knowledge* of the world, and that should, inevitably, lead us to some kind of universal basic income structure. When people are secure in the basic needs of their families and are guaranteed right-to-work, they have the ability to pursue readership at the expense of luxury good purchase power.
Bellamy’s system was, roughly, to hold part of each individual’s universal basic income earnings in escrow. For stuff that can be electronically- or print-duplicated, you have access to a government-maintained clearinghouse for creative works. You access whatever you want, and at year’s end the government automatically distributes (1/n) of your annual escrow money to the acknowledged creator of that work. (Here acknowledged creator = IP holder. I guess there’s no requirement that the creator be the recipient of the money, if you want creators to be able to sell their IP rights.) Anyhow, the money allotted to one person isn’t enough to make “my brother and I buy only each other’s books” type fraud appealing, it’s like 0.001% of basic income or something, but recompense and popularity are directly correlated. And 0.001% of basic income times 100,000 readers is likely to be quite substantial.
I don’t know if .mp3 audio and .jpg pictures and .whatevermoviesare and .pdf books would all be under the same escrow account, as one .mp3 song is more like a book chapter than a book, but uses up more server space than a book. That kind of detail is easy enough to sort out once folks agree on the general system. I think there’s also some kind of voting system where you can tweak and reapportion where your escrow contribution goes; the 1/n model is just a default.
Of course, it’s possible to set up a rogue clearinghouse which distributes those mp3 files without recompense. The system is somewhat relying somewhat on the iTunes-vs-bittorrent principle: if it’s sufficiently easy and painless, most people will go ahead and use the institutional structure and even pay a little, rather than use a rogue structure, to acquire what they want.
*As before, throwing everything into the blanket term knowledge which could be subject to IP type laws, including creative works of fiction, movies, etc.
novakant 09.15.10 at 11:52 pm
Copyright imposes larger costs on writers than anyone else. First, because it limits the number of people who see their work.
It’s not clear to me what you actually want: every writer is free to upload their masterpiece straight from their drawer as a pdf or ebook anywhere without any licensing restrictions (or whatever licensing they choose) and everybody with an internet connection will be able to read it – that is almost unlimited access right there, but apparently not what you want. So what is it?
if I want to record and distribute my own version of the song, copyright restrictions may be quite effective in pre3enting me from doing so.
Well, if you want to profit from somebody else’s ideas, then its only fair that the creator of the original work gets some share of that profit, if he chooses, no? Furthermore it all depends on what you mean by your “own version”, this is and will always be tricky territory, because determining how much is original and how much is new is tough. If there are no restrictions at all, I could just change a word or a chord and sell it as my own work. If there are too many restrictions it would indeed hamper artistic activity. You need to strike a balance.
Lemuel Pitkin 09.16.10 at 12:01 am
Salient,
The basic income makes the rest of the scheme unnecessary. If everyone has sufficient resources and leisure to write novels, record music, etc. then there is no need for an additional per-reproduction payment. Intrinsic motivation will suffice.
Of course this only applies to work that can be created by an individual or a small group. Creative work that requires a more extensive division of labor does need some specific compensation. Luckily, we already have well-developed institutions for this — universities, museums, public symphonies and theater companies, research institutes, and hoc genus omne. Public institutions that pay a salary to people doing creative work, use some mix of reputational incentives and top-down direction to solve coordination problems, and don’t depend on property rights in the product for their support, have a vastly greater track record in supporting intellectual production than copyrights and patents do.
It’s also worth noting that eliminating copyrights would not, in fact, eliminate payments for material that is currently copyrighted. Norton sold over 1 million copies of the 9/11 Commission report, apparently at a profit, despite the fact that as a federal document it is not copyrighted. In general, there is a lack of evidence that payments required specifically by copyrights are an important source of income for people doing intellectual work.
tomslee 09.16.10 at 12:04 am
On the writing for free strand, I am not at all convinced that free = bigger audience. Of course, if other books are expensive and you have a loud megaphone to call attention to your book, then you will get a bigger audience by giving it away (the Cory Doctorow model).
But if everyone gives books for free then there will be more books (of generally lower quantity), so unless the amount of reading goes up each book will be read, on average, by fewer people.
AntiAlias asks for a Different Mechanism which does not imply W4F
T shirts, obviously. Please deliver my Internet to my home address.
burritoboy 09.16.10 at 12:08 am
“It all comes down to making sure creative folks are financially secured. Which would be provided / should be provided by universal basic income.”
Actually, pre-modern societies did a much superior job of supporting creative people. You do it through state-sponsored religion – how almost all artists, philosophers, musicians, etc supported themselves was in producing religious art, music, theology and so on. Religious art isn’t precisely all that limiting. You can smuggle almost anything you want into it. The possibilities of smuggling are not entirely unlimited, true, but nearly so.
I would argue that being supported by religion is superior to how modern societies support the life of the mind – for example, the Roman Catholic church mandated in medieval times that every church have a specified minimum number of art works, for instance. Every church in every location – essentially a massive jobs program for artists. Every major church would have a regular, required schedule of musical performances – a jobs program for musicians and composers. The need for education was high and required, since there was a specified amount of training various clergy members were required to have – a jobs program for educators and thinkers.
Further, since political regimes use state-sponsored religions as a political tool, the state itself puts pressure on for frequent expansion of religious buildings, artworks, schools, texts and so on.
novakant 09.16.10 at 1:06 am
Public institutions that pay a salary to people doing creative work, use some mix of reputational incentives and top-down direction to solve coordination problems, and don’t depend on property rights in the product for their support, have a vastly greater track record in supporting intellectual production than copyrights and patents do.
So you would put e.g. the whole film industry into the hands of a publicly funded body with top down direction? That is not going to work out creatively and the political implications are rather scary. I’m not denying that public film funding is and has been be a more or less important factor, depending on the countries and times respectively, but firstly it has had no impact on copyright law and secondly I think the best results, both creatively and commercially have always been achieved through a mix of public (were needed) and private film financing, while the output of fully state funded film industries (e.g. the Warsaw Pact states) has been pretty weak in comparison.
Salient 09.16.10 at 1:15 am
The basic income makes the rest of the scheme unnecessary. If everyone has sufficient resources and leisure to write novels, record music, etc. then there is no need for an additional per-reproduction payment. Intrinsic motivation will suffice.
I feel that way too. But folks on the thread (or at least AntiAlias) were specifically requesting a system in which content creators get compensated financially for their labors. And I think I could be okay with a system incorporating that, though my ideal is a variant of ‘everyone gets paid the same, there’s minimal inheritance of wealth’ with guaranteed right-to-work in an accommodating environment, with some kind of special compensation for danger, hardship, and whatever other factors would drive people away from a particular job…
Anyhow. If I am rereading Looking Backward correctly, Bellamy institutes the redistribution scheme as a complicated way to help people who create something valued by society to be rewarded for it: but not with more money: instead, their work requirements are reduced by the amount ‘paid’ to them by other people, if it exceeds their allotted escrow amount. So creators of popular content are afforded more leisure time (in Bellamy’s system universal basic income is derived from universal right to work; people must work at some job for their money unless they are provably disabled; persons with disabilities are given work which does not conflict with their disabilities when feasible, I think, though Bellamy is maddeningly unclear on this).
John Quiggin 09.16.10 at 1:26 am
As Akshay says above, I think the current system, taken as a whole, has negative net benefits. But I’d be perfectly happy with 14 years copyright, limited-term patents for actual inventions, trademarks to protecting customers against fakes rather than to defend markets against competitors, and so on.
I doubt that there are many (any?) artists or writers for whom the difference between 14 and lifetime+99 corresponds to the difference between making a living and not doing so.
Salient 09.16.10 at 1:32 am
So you would put e.g. the whole film industry into the hands of a publicly funded body with top down direction?
No, but the redistributive system I proposed (for example) would adequately cover these cases:
Production company invests millions on a film; n users access the film; their escrow money is sent to the production company; production company makes money if enough users go see the film. There’s lots of options for running the theater itself: the government could run the projection room, and collect interest from users in advance for which movies to show in a given week, from a list of newly available titles. Or, private venues could run the projection room and make their money off concessions, which is the standard model for theaters already anyway; they’d take the head-count information for which users attended so that the appropriate escrow redistribution still occurs.
If that’s not enough to fund blockbuster entertainment, the government could increase the size of the escrow, or give the escrow dollars a multiplier effect for certain cost-intensive industries. Those kinds of tweaks build upon a stable basic model and make further media innovations possible to accommodate.
And… I’d be happy to live in a world in which all human beings receive the social goods I outlined, but blockbuster movies are made less frequently.
Ken 09.16.10 at 2:46 am
John Quiggin@53: “I doubt that there are many (any?) artists or writers for whom the difference between 14 and lifetime+99 corresponds to the difference between making a living and not doing so.”
This is certainly true, as the vast majority of books go out of print within ten years of first publication. Something similar happens with music, movies, and most creative works – the majority generate at best a brief flurry of interest and sales before disappearing.
This has led me to toy with an idea for a variation of the copyright system. Let copyright be automatic and free for fourteen years, or a similar relatively-brief period. After that, the copyright can be extended each year by paying a fee to the government.
In most cases, the creator will obtain the full benefit of the copyright in that first free period – they will receive the whole of the revenue stream that will ever be generated by the work, since that revenue all occurs within a few years of the printing – and it will then drop into the public domain. If the creator does happen to produce a work that continues to sell for decades, he or she can pay to extend the copyright for as long as desired; presumably this will be as long as the anticipated revenue justifies the fee.
Oh, and the reason the fee is paid to the government is that the government is the enforcer of the copyright. That is, if you expect the FBI to hunt down people who illegally print your copyrighted cartoon character on T-shirts, and the court system to put those people on trial, you should pay a little something for that.
novakant 09.16.10 at 3:27 am
Sorry, but all of this sounds way too much like the GDR to me. I hate the idea of the state regulating the arts or and would rather face merciless capitalism and a shallow mass market than have some bureaucrat decide what’s good and right for me or society.
Lemuel Pitkin 09.16.10 at 3:30 am
the output of fully state funded film industries (e.g. the Warsaw Pact states) has been pretty weak in comparison.
J. Hoberman: “When people … ask me my ‘all-time favorite movie’ or ‘the greatest movie ever made’, I brace myself for a look of blank incomprehension and say, ‘Dziga Vertov’s The Man With a Movie Camera.”
Lemuel Pitkin 09.16.10 at 3:38 am
Not to mention Kiezlowski’s Decalogue. If The Wire has edged it as the greatest thing ever made for TV, it’s by a nose.
In general, I find this terror of any mechanism but the market when it comes to art … odd. Never mind everything that was produced in all the centuries of human civilization except the past two; just look around you. The best setting for seeing movies I’ve ever been in, hands down, was the University of Chicago in the 1990s, when there were not one, not two, but three decent-quality theaters showing something every single night: Doc, with a mix of second runs and American indies; the law school theater, with classic American movies from the 30s through the 70s; and International House, with, as you might guess, international movies. No one was making a penny, and there were far more offerings than you’d find in the multiplexes of even a medium-sized city, let alone a community that size.
Salient 09.16.10 at 4:08 am
I hate the idea of the state regulating the arts
Wait, what? You’re the one defending the status quo of IP law. That’s very obviously the state regulating the arts. “You can’t sell that: it’s too close to this other thing that someone else has been selling.”
I mean, IP law is the state regulating the arts. A fully deregulated environment would offer no such protection whatsoever.
would rather face merciless capitalism and a shallow mass market than have some bureaucrat decide what’s good and right for me or society.
Sure. And I’d rather have people deciding by popular vote how to apportion funding for the arts than have Walt Disney make all my decisions for me.
Except… both of those statements are weird, offensive straw men, right? Nobody was proposing a top-down system in which a bureaucrat gets to decide what does or doesn’t fly. Not here on CT, at least. The system I proposed based compensation entirely on popularity, guaranteed access to everything, and was basically deregulated in that there was no a priori preferential treatment given to any particular book over any other particular book, for example.
In that model, the government basically provided the infrastructure, which is the whole point of government: to provide infrastructure so that its citizens can live awesome lives in a state of well-being (with certain kinds of needless and avoidable suffering minimized and liberty maximized and whatnot).
dsquared 09.16.10 at 8:49 am
Uh, no. The trademark system recognizes something called territoriality. If you spend your advertising money in Ultima Thule to establish spaghetti™ as a tasty and healthy food and afterwards Barilla or De Cecco decide to enter the Ultimathulean market calling their own semolina noodles “spaghetti†there they’re free-riding on your efforts. That’s what trademark law is set up to prevent.
This really isn’t what territoriality means, AFAICS. It just means that trademarks are local to the jurisdiction in which they’re trademarked.
hix 09.16.10 at 11:12 am
If its all just his genius marketing, why did he use such a well known Australian term in the first place? No one would take such an unecessary risk. The only logical explanation is that the local Australian brand already did have some appeal across the globe he tried to free ride.
John Quiggin 09.16.10 at 11:36 am
What really gets me about this case is that it’s almost perfectly specific to the US-Australia patron-client relationship. If a US troll tried to do this with an item from African traditional culture, they would (rightly) be crucified in the court of public opinion. If they tried to do it to Europeans (some of whom appear to be defending them here) the courts in Europe would slap them down, and the rest of the world would follow. And of course, if Australians tried to steal “apple pie” or “coonskin caps” from the Americans they would be crushed. Maybe the Americans could do it to Canada and maybe not. But they can certainly get away with it in our case, in both directions.
novakant 09.16.10 at 11:46 am
Well, I think Hoberman is a willfully idiosyncratic grumpy old crank, but fortunately I don’t need his endorsement to admire “Man with a Movie Camera” (which I happen to own in both the “Cinematic Orchestra” and “Michael Nyman” versions – awesome). Bringing it up in this context though is a bit self-defeating since soon after Stalin’s grip on the Soviet film industry strangled artistic expression for decades to come and Vertov ended his career as a newsreel editor, because his formalist experiments had fallen out of favour with the bureaucrats who pushed the party line of socialist realism.
And you’ll be happy to hear that I do admire “Dekalog” as well, but again, it’s not really a great example to support your point, for reasons that should be obvious: released in 1989, funded by West German money, Kieslowski’s subsequent films all French productions.
And anyway, my point stands that, notwithstanding the odd masterpiece, the film output of the Warsaw Pact states has not been very impressive comparatively and that this has a lot do with the policies governing film production. And my point is strengthened by the fact that many of the most talented filmmakers from these countries (Polanski, Forman, Holland, Kovacs, Zsigmond …) went to Western Europe or Hollywood as soon as they got the chance – there is a reason for this.
Matt 09.16.10 at 12:03 pm
notwithstanding the odd masterpiece, the film output of the Warsaw Pact states has not been very impressive comparatively and that this has a lot do with the policies governing film production.
I think this is probably a bit to the side of the (interesting) main discussion, but I’m a big fan of Soviet films, and there are significantly more than the “odd masterpiece” that range from very good to excellent. (I don’t know much about film from the other Warsaw pact countries.) I don’t think this is an argument for state control of the arts, but the case is more complicated than we might think at first, at least in relation to artistic excellence. This brings us to the second point. I think that a very strong case can be made that the movies made by Tarkovsky, Konchalovsky, and even Mikhalkov in the Soviet Union were better, sometimes significantly better, than the movies they made outside or after it. This doesn’t mean that these directors didn’t have (good) reason to prefer working outside or after the Soviet Union, but only that the connection between even fairly heavy-handed state control and good art isn’t as direct as we might think. (There are, of course, lots of other reasons to oppose much government control of the arts.)
Zamfir 09.16.10 at 1:03 pm
JQ, I can find one case about Ugg boots in the Netherlands here the verdict . It’s in Dutch, but as you can from the pictures it was about a company (El Cheapa) that tried to make their boots and packaging exactly like Decker boots, trying to trick people into believing these were Decker-made boots (they did not deny this in court). Ironically, they advertised with was “Hand made in Australia, not made in China”.
Among other claims, the court considered UGG (in capitals) a recognized brand name in the Benelux, and says it needs more than opinions from Australian companies to reconsider that. This point wasn’t pushed, as the rest of the case (logo’s etc.) was clear.
Still, the formulation of the court suggest that it could be convinced otherwise. The crucial part about the name, for the court, is that visitors of the El Cheapa website would likely think that name UGG referred to the brand of Decker.
What I get from the decision is that an Autralian company would perhaps be allowed to advertise in the Netherlands with the name Ugg, if they did not try in any sense to pretend to sell Decker boots. That seems reasonable, but I can’t be sure that would really be the outcome.
ogmb 09.16.10 at 1:05 pm
tps12 @34: If they didn’t eat extruded semolina paste in Ultima Thule at all originally, then the upstarts are “free-riding on your efforts†regardless of what they call their product.
Point being?
dsquared @60: This really isn’t what territoriality means, AFAICS. It just means that trademarks are local to the jurisdiction in which they’re trademarked.
The sentence starting with “If you spend your advertising money…” wasn’t meant to provide a definition of territoriality, only to describe the consequences. Simply put, local courts won’t recognize challenges based on trademarks established in other jurisdictions nor claims based on arguments that terms are generic in other jurisdictions. Similarly, denominations (e.g. “Budweiser beer”) aren’t recognized across national boundaries unless by treaty. Ironically enough the absence of such treaties in the early 20th century allowed Anheuser-Bush to protect the generic denomination for beer from Budweis as a trademark in the U.S., and only in the late 20th century has the EU started to push for international protection, at least for regional food. So if anything IP has inched closer to a regime where “Ugg” would be protected.
john b 09.16.10 at 2:14 pm
John@62, isn’t that a point about the Australian government’s shameless craven deference to the US on all matters more so than a point about IP law – or even about the US government’s behaviour? I mean, I don’t blame the US government for a bit of populist mercantilism – but every Australian government post-WWII has acted as if making America happy, rather than what benefits Australians, is their key policy aim (I’m aware that every Australian government pre-WWII behaved in the same way towards the UK, but not convinced it’s much of a defence).
zamfir 09.16.10 at 3:30 pm
In what sense is Australia deferring to the US in this case? Ugg seems to accepted as a generic name in Australia. To get it accepted elsewhere would require that other countries change their laws to benefit Australia.
That’s something the EU is pretty good at within its own borders, but it already requires massive negotiations. On a wider scale the US and EU seem to have enough clout to sometimes encourage others to do so, but keeping unified enough to have such clout is for the EU not a trivial thing.
I guess Australia could.try and form a sort of alliance with the EU, accepting their rules of the game in return for getting to add a few rules of their own. But isn’t that basically what Australia tries with respect to the US, and wouldn’t the EU behave similar to the US?
Perhaps you can organize a Third Way in the trade wars. I am sure China is willing to help you in not accepting ugg as trademark.
piglet 09.16.10 at 6:17 pm
piglet 09.16.10 at 6:47 pm
Chris 09.16.10 at 11:02 pm
if a patent was granted by a patent officer unaware of the existence of prior art, that patent would have to be invalidated.
Why doesn’t this principle control the Ugg case? Uggs (the Australian ones) are clearly an art prior to any action of Decker’s, regardless of whether or not a patent officer or the US general public knew about them.
I suppose the analogy of prior art : patent :: generic term : trademark isn’t perfect, but it seems good enough for this purpose. Decker’s didn’t create Uggs (either the word or the thing), so they shouldn’t be allowed to appropriate the legal privileges intended for the creators of new things. It’s obvious why the legal system possibly ought to privilege creation (even though that’s disputable, there is at least a clear argument for it). Appropriation, not so much.
John Quiggin 09.16.10 at 11:28 pm
Zamfir, if Decker only wants to protect themselves against knockoffs, why don’t they just use and defend the trademark “Decker”?
Lemuel Pitkin 09.16.10 at 11:40 pm
Piglet-
The Basmati thing is great. Do you have a link?
Lemuel Pitkin 09.16.10 at 11:43 pm
I see it’s very googleable. Never mind!
Jim Rose 09.17.10 at 12:58 am
Trademarks protect brand names.
When sellers are not identified with brand names, by trademarks, a crucial element of the market process cannot operate because consumers cannot use past experiences to learn which products to buy and which not to buy. Consumers can neither punish sellers that supply low-quality by refraining from repeated purchases nor reward firms that supply higher-quality products by increasing their purchases.
Brand-name quality assurance is especially important when buyers lack sufficient information about product quality at the time of purchase. The greater the value of a company’s brand name, the more likely the company is to take quality-control precautions.
Nuisance suits are a general problem that can be prevented in a number of ways.
In many disputes, the expected value to the plaintiff from going to trial is negative because the chances of winning are small or because the litigation costs are large. While such a plaintiff would not go to trial, they might sue in the hope of extracting a settlement offer. some are suing solely to extract a small settlement offer.
Nuisance suits are common in environmental and resource management law, but few would suggest that this is a valid ground to repeal or curtail the substance of environmental law. The goal of reducing nuisance suits is often confused with the entirely separate and more dubious goal of reducing litigation.
Revised fee-shifting rules and rules about security of costs are some answers to nuisance suits. The rules on how a suit is brought and who can sue and at what judicial forums can make nuisance suits difficult. A judge can punish as well as dismiss. Courts have inherent powers to control bad-faith conduct.
p.s. there is a home owner in the next city to me who is said to file an objection to every town planning and resource consent application in her entire region. Should zoning laws be repealed, or should the filing fees be increased and the security of legal costs laws be amended?
botas ugg 09.17.10 at 6:06 am
I don’t think this is an argument for state control of the arts, but the case is more complicated than we might think at first, at least in relation to artistic excellence.
novakant 09.17.10 at 1:27 pm
#64
Matt, your points are well taken, it is difficult be really familiar with the history of even one national cinema and since we’re judging the work of individual artists generalizations will always be inadequate to some extent. That said, I think they can be made and be useful, if we try to evaluate the overall output (not just the outstanding works) of national film industries over long periods of time and then try to relate it to the conditions of production.
To give another example: I think most people would agree that the French film industry is in better shape than the German and, since these two countries are quite similar in many respects, it can be useful to ask what the French are doing differently – this can be a quite constructive even.
Just out of interest: could you recommend websites or books that list Russian films worth watching beyond the canonized works most people are aware of already? Thanks.
hix 09.18.10 at 4:52 pm
First,the premise is wrong, why should the Fench film industry do any better. Second, they get more subsidies, which might help to produce even more films targeted towards an upper class niche taste of the political influential.
BillCinSD 09.18.10 at 5:18 pm
“if a patent was granted by a patent officer unaware of the existence of prior art, that patent would have to be invalidated.”
I’m pretty sure the current US patent examiner interpretation of prior art is prior patent art. That definitely was the case for my patent
tomslee 09.18.10 at 8:27 pm
The best book I have read on the economics and politics of cultural industries, including the various methods countries have used to support and protect them, is Blockbusters and Trade Wars by Peter Grant and Chris Wood. Published about 5 years ago, it seems not to have got much attention, which is a shame. It deserves better.
piglet 09.18.10 at 8:45 pm
“I’m pretty sure the current US patent examiner interpretation of prior art is prior patent art. That definitely was the case for my patent”
So I could patent any yet unpatented invention, including the fire, the axe, the printing type? Cool. Unfortunately you may not be too far off. US patent examiners are known for their ridiculous decisions, including the Basmati rice case. But this isn’t how patent protection is supposed to work. If it has been done and described before, it cannot be a new invention period.
John Quiggin 09.18.10 at 8:52 pm
Australia’s own contribution is the “innovation patent” under which a Melbourne lawyer patented the wheel.
http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn965-wheel-patented-in-australia.html
Admittedly, this was a joke, of the kind we like in this part of the world.
ogmb 09.20.10 at 11:00 am
piglet @70: Even if no patent has been registered in your (or any) jurisdiction, if it can be proven that prior art exists, your patent office is legally prevented from registering that patent, and if a patent was granted by a patent officer unaware of the existence of prior art, that patent would have to be invalidated.
Except that a patent is not a trademark, a patent application is not a trademark registration, and prior art is not genericness.
novakant 09.21.10 at 12:14 pm
#78 you don’t know what you’re talking about
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