This site, MulletsGalore, is hilarious. See “classifications” link, then then see, e.g., “classic mullet,” “camaro mullet,” and my favorite, “mullatino.”
A federal judge has declared the Pledge of Allegiance to be an unconstitutional state endorsement of religion because it says, “under God.” What’s the libertarian stance on this? Well, personally, I don’t honestly see how a public school adopting a religious pledge infringes anyone’s “rights”. You can still be an atheist or Hindu even if the local government schools lead kids in a mindless chant.
But it seems to me we have to keep our eye on the ball. The main state evil is taxes. So do I support abortion or want it outlawed?–it depends on which one will lower my taxes. Do I want drugs legalized?–it depends, will it lower my taxes? Etc. I think we should found a political party dedicated to this proposition: the Tax Cut Party.
Kind of crude, but pretty darned funny: The 25 Most Inappropriate Things An Objectivist Can Say During Sex.
In a recent blog post (The Death of Blogger?), Jonah Goldberg frets about Blogger‘s possible demise, due to generic uses of the term “blogger”. The term is sometimes used to refer to the Blogger service offered at www.blogger.com, and sometimes descriptively–as in “Glenn Reynolds is a leading blogger,” etc. Goldberg writes, “Right now millions of people use blogger as a lower case adjective, verb and noun. I blog, you blog, he/she blogs.” Horrors! People are using language to communicate!
Jonah notes that “Aspirin was once a Bayer product, now it is the generic name for the drug. DuPont lost Cellophane™ to cellophane and the Otis elevator company once had the exclusive rights to the word Escalator™”. He worries that the word “blogger” may become generic, thus causing Blogger to lose its “trademark status.” Jonah concludes, “If this keeps up, Pyra Labs–the owner of Blogger–could win the “Blogger Revolution” and go broke at the same time.”
Methinks Jonah is trying to sound sophisticated and learned by pretending to know about trademark law; but he badly mangles his case. For one, the way a mark becomes generic is first, a company coins a fanciful, non-descriptive name, like “Cellophane”; the company then uses this mark in commerce to establish common law rights and then obtains a federal registration for the mark. Then, the word becomes used generically to describe any products of the same ilk. Coining the mark comes before genericide, not the other way around. Now I see no reason to assume that “blogger” was coined by Blogger, or that “blogger” is anything other than a descriptive term, or that Blogger has ever had trademark rights in the word.
Blogger does not have a registered trademark, nor even a pending registration, as a quick search on the USPTO’s Trademark Electronic Search System (TESS) reveals. All we know is that Pyra labs owns the domain blogger.com, and offers a service that it calls Blogger. It also puts the ™ symbol up by its mark “Blogger” on its site, which actually indicates that it does not have a registered mark (otherwise we’d see the ® symbol). The ™ symbol only means Blogger is trying to hold itself out as claiming some common law trademark rights in the mark “Blogger” that we see on its site. For all we know, the TM symbol indicates the particular stylized design of its mark (the shape and maybe color of the letters etc.).
If Blogger does file an application to register the word mark “blogger”, it is likely to run into problems because the word is merely descriptive, IMO. Why would Blogger own a word in common use, just because they name their company after it? If Blogger could own the word blogger, I could start a company tomorrow called “Internet” and thus “own” all uses of that word. I don’t know why Jonah thinks the descriptive term “blogger” is protectable as trademark, nor why he thinks Blogger would be the owner of it, nor why he seems to think Blogger coined the term “blog.”
As for Blogger’s fate if it does not own all trademark rights in the word “blogger”–does he think Blogger depends on a monopoly on the use of the word “blogger” for its success? Doesn’t he realize that the spread of the word “blogger” can only help Blogger? Bottom line–Blogger profits by having customers utilize its service, which is offered at the website www.blogger.com. How exactly is the use by others of the term “blogger” in articles etc., going to make Blogger.com go broke?
Molten, smelted, clack, clamber, trenchant, toddle, and toddy. Added to my list of Annoying and Cool words.
Why I like The Greenbag (click “submissions” [archived; recent masthead]): “Citations should be accurate, complete, and unobtrusive. Familiar sources need no citation. Authors may use whatever citation form they prefer; we will make changes only to keep footnotes from looking like goulash.”
On my deathbed, just to be a smartass, I plan to say, as my final words, “I wish I had spent more time at the office.”
Cato’s Doug Bandow argues in favor of patents on the grounds that lack of patent rights would threaten pharmaceutical innovations. Ironically, Cato scholar Tom Palmer has argued extensively and carefully, contra his boss Bandow, that patents are not compatible with property rights (scroll down; two articles on left side of Palmer’s page). I wonder why Bandow ignores his own IP guru’s work? I wonder when Cato shifted from being principled, anarchist, natural rights oriented to being minarchist, utilitarian oriented? Maybe they’re reading Liberty magazine too much over there.
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