Trademark

ICANN relaxes the regulation of TLDs. Expect URL hell to break loose.

I don't even want to think about the consequences of this.

Today the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) approved a measure to alow anybody with $50,000 or $100,000 to create whatever Top Level Domain (TLD) they want. Although this may spell doom for URL speculators, for small new media owners like myself (aka, bloggers), this may spell trouble.

Imagine a big media company buying up ".culturekitchen" to peddle international cookbooks. Now I have to not only take them to court, but hope to win and have them surrender to me my trademarked URL.

As a small media company (culturekitchen is incorporated), we're screwed. Who has the money to buy their blog's trademarked name or for that matter, to sue a richer company that, may buy up your blog's trademarked name knowing you won't be able to take them to court and fight for your rights?

For small new media entrepreneurs like bloggers, this could spell disaster.

On a more positive note, domains in Asian and Arabic languages have been approved. What I am wondering about it is whether they are also going to recognize Romance language spellings with characters with special notation such as ñ, ü or é.

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Intellectual Property Law, a recipe for genocide

Intellectual Property Rights block technology transfer and TRIPS (trade-related aspects of intellectual property rights) promote monopolies on seeds and medicines and piracy of Third World biodiversity and indigenous knowledge.

That is why we had to fight WR Grace and USDA to revoke the Neem Patent, we had to fight Ricetec to prevent them claiming our basmati as their invention. And we have successfully fought

The rules of The World Trade Organization were designed to impoverish poor people and poor countries, transform their biodiversity and water commons into corporate property so that seed multi-national corporations like Monsanto could sell us our seeds for $1 tr. per year and water giants like Suez and Bechtel could sell us our water for another trillion. And the free trade rules of agriculture are robbing Indian peasants of $1 trillion per year through falling prices because of $400 billion subsidies in rich countries distorting trade by distorting prices.

This is not just a recipe for poverty, it is a recipe for genocide. In the free trade world that Bhagwati upholds, peasants sell kidneys to pay debt for poisons, displaced rural women sell their bodies to feed their children, hospitals become centers of organ theft, and India which sold the finest fabrics and tastiest spices to the world becomes the dumping ground for the toxic wste of 9/11 and the exploded and unexploded shells from the war in Afganistan and Iraq.

Free trade is becoming a mechanism to take our wealth, our biodiversity, our minerals, our brains and give us trash and toxic in exchange. It is an exchange of "bads" for "goods". This is not comparative advantage, it is loot. Which is why we say, "Our World is not for sale".

— Vandana Shiva, ecofeminist activist
ZNet Commentary: An Attack On People's Movements

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Fair Use and Net Neutrality are the same thing

So the recent struggles about network neutrality have led me to recognize something I hadn't quite seen before. And that something in turn makes more puzzling the debates that have been raised around network neutrality. The something to recognize is that in a fundamental sense, fair use (FU) and network neutrality (NN) are the same thing. They are both state enforced limits on the property rights of others. In both cases, the limits are slight --the vast range of uses granted a copyright holder are only slightly restricted by FU; the vast range of uses allowed a network owner are only slightly restricted by NN. And in both cases, the line defining the limits is uncertain. But in both cases, those who support each say that the limits imposed on the property right are necessary for some important social end (admittedly, different in each case), and that the costs of enforcing those limits are outweighed by the benefits of protecting that social end. So from this perspective, it is easy to understand those who reject FU and NN (who are they?). And it is easy to understand those who embrace FU and NN. What gets difficult is understanding those who embrace one while rejecting the other --at least when that rejection is articulated in terms of "government regulation".

—

Lawrence Lessig

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Blaxploitation Redux, Part Deux : When niggas attack (the trademark office)

[via Wired News:]:

The actor Damon Wayans has been engaged in a 14-month fight to trademark the term "Nigga" for a clothing line and retail store, a search of the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office's online database reveals.

Wayans wants to dress customers in 14 kinds of attire from tops to bottoms, and use the controversial mark on "clothing, books, music and general merchandise," as well as movies, TV and the internet, according to his applications.

But, so far, his applications have been unsuccessful. Trademark examiner Kelly Boulton rejected the registration dated Dec. 22, citing a law that prohibits marks that are "immoral or scandalous." A previous attempt by Wayans was turned down on identical grounds six months earlier.

"While debate exists about in-group uses of the term, 'nigga' is almost universally understood to be derogatory," Boulton wrote to Wayans' attorney, William H. Cox, according to the application.

Damon Wayans is one crazy mutherfocker and I honestly do not know if to take this as a publicity stunt or a real honest attempt at registering the trademark. But if it is a serious attempt at registering "NIGGER" as his intellectual property, then I'd have to be upset at his audacity.

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Google's new motto : Do no evil (unless there's a profit)

When it comes to technology companies, especially Google, I take their "benefit to mankind" with a huge boulder of salt; especially with my current experience with GoogleNews. They dropped culturekitchen from their rotation because it was not "newsy" enough. Meanwhile, they go out of their way to include such beacons of truthiness like LifeNews, ScienceDaily and my all time favorite, Men's News Daily.

Seth Finkelstein is the man I read daily for all things truthy about Google. I thought I was paranoid about the run around the search company has been giving me since December --basically, since the site was switched to a new platform. Then I read his post, British national Party and Google News. Real eye-opener in view of the next two kerfuffles involving Google in the last month.

The first one being the alleged "fight for privacy rights" that many netopians claim is what behind Google's fight to not release query information to the Justice Department. Yeah, right. They are fighting for the right to privacy but not of the regular citizen :