Melancholy Elephants

Today, I was reading in the paper about a local band calling itself "The Olympic Hopefuls" which, receiving a C & D from the USOC, changed its name, quite simply, to the hopefuls. It seems that "Olympic" was trademarked in a 1950 Congressional act.

I see stuff like this happening all the time. Copyright owners (more often companies than artists) cracking down on fan web sites and fan fiction. Trivial suits over whether one can use the word "Spam" or "Windows" or the time Coors Brewing company sued R.J. Corr's natural sodas. Here in Saint Paul, there was once a local Pizza shop, owned by a man named John, called "Papa John's." When the national chain by the same name moved into the area, his business had to bcome "John's Pizza Cafe."

Seems to me that we've got a lot more trivial lawsuits in the arena of Intellectual Property than in Liability. But since IP Lawsuits tend to entail corporations winning against ordinary people and small business owners, rather than ordinary people and small business owners winning against corporations, I don't for see any calls for IP Law reform forthcoming.

Indeed, I think it can be safely argued, that with companies needing to do expensive and exhaustive "prior-art" searches before investing in invention, and given that the Garage inventor does not have the resources to do this, that our IP law has crossed the line from fostering innovation to inhibiting it.

Here is a link to the Spider Robinson story "Melancholy Elephants" which I think is an essential read for our times, dealing as it does, with the ultimate consequences of IP law: http://www.baen.com/chapters/W200011/0671319744___1.htm

A few random thoughts on Stem Cell research.

I was tempted to say, on George W. Bush's position on Stem Cell research, that he might be doing the right thing, if for the wrong reasons, in hampering it. After all, technology growth has outpaced the abilities of our ethicists, philosophers, and religious institutions to develop responses to it that will allow us to use the technology wisely and morally. The commodification of human material is definitely something we need to tread lightly around.

I was tempted, I say, because then I realized something. Bush has not proposed a ban or moratorium on the research, or, for that matter, even the creation of new stem cell lines. Rather, his actions merely amount to a refusal to provide money from the public sector. As I meditated on the implications of this for a moment I realized that what this means is that any meaningful stem cell research that gets done is going to be a strictly private sector endeavor, and that any discoveries, inventions, and methods resulting from this will be the exclusive intellectual property of the corporations that funded it.

Publicly funded research has given us an awful lot. The internet emerged from a DARPA funded project at MIT. Developments in radio and television also have their roots in publicly funded (mostly military) research, and it is because it was publicly funded that these things became as pervasive as they have.

It seems to me that what Bush is doing isn't so much about "the sanctity of life," as it is about excluding the public sector from a technology with significant business potential, and ensuring that the patents are privately held. Whether that is his intention, or merely the effects of him short-sightedly following his moral compass, I cannot tell.

How 80's does it get?

An Atari 2600 Video Game whose premise is to get the Journey Band Members to their "E5C4P3 Scarab.":
http://www.journey-tribute.com/journey/resources/atari2600/
Is there any more emblematic artifact of the eighties than a Journey Atari game?