You’ll never know until you try. That’s what “they” say, “they” usually being your parents or others who want to encourage you to stretch beyond your comfort zone to make an effort beyond what we think we can do. It;s a phrase that we associate with timidity, but in a certain context it applies to the more brazen among us, those who might dare something so bold that they think they might get away with it, if only for the fact that no one ever considered that someone might try to.
Continue reading “Liverpool F.C. Tries to Trademark…Liverpool?”
Modern-day science seems to dance along the fine line between awe-inspiring breakthrough and terrifying overreach. In the parlance of fiction, we seem to exist in the inflection point in the story wherein the scientist is making a decision that will ultimately lead them to go too far with their innovative work, dare too greatly and ultimately pays a personal cost — take your pick from Dr. Frankenstein to Dr. Octavius. Those are dramatic examples, certainly, and fictitious ones at that, but fiction does serve to highlight the human condition; science can be messy and contentious and at times terrifying, and yesterday’s scorned scientist is tomorrow’s supervillain.
Names ultimately matter. That’s more or less the basis of trademarks as a concept: the right and the necessity to protect the name we’ve built for something that’s ours. something we’ve created. Our lives are ordered in some part by names, both the ones we’ve coined in the recent history of modern innovation and those whose origins are lost to time. We drive to work on a series of named roads, to an office building or complex that likely has a name, to work for a company granted a name by its founder years, if not decades ago. Anything less than that would be chaos, and even the occasional re-brand has us shaken for months.
The idea of the future as equal parts wonder and nightmare is an old one. It’s all over our science-fiction, in particular the notion that the same advances that push us forward could serve as the seeds of our own destruction. Robots built to serve humanity ultimately enslave us, and technology binds us and restricts us in the name of transparency and security, civic-minded ideas masking an authoritarian agenda at its heart. Grim stuff, I know, but not so grim as to prevent us from propelling ourselves ever onward toward a version of that same future close enough to be functionally indistinguishable from what we’ve seen on page or screen.
There’s no greater harbinger of potential legal issues than success. In a reading more generous to plaintiffs in the scores of lawsuits that pop up around successful artists, creators and businesses, you could assert that it’s the success that brings the infringement to light; the aggrieved doesn’t know they’ve had their idea infringed upon until they see its likeness in the news or on their screens or devices. You could just as easily say that some see a chance at a possible payday in those same stories. Both are undoubtedly true, but the determination of the measure of each is a matter of your outlook on the state of the legal system and the world as a whole.
There are few hings more totemically American, at least in origin, as McDonald’s. The arches. The colors. The menu items. The subsequent guilt and shame that come with each meal. It’s a brand that’s been built over decades, and one that serves as the foundation of what we know as fast food today. What we see in the logo and understand with the name is that we are going to get food of a particular quality at an understood price and in short order. That understanding and assumption is the essence of any brand, and it’s why McDonald’s and others go to such great lengths to protect their brand against what they perceive as a taint or diminution.
We’ve all spent enough time on the internet to have seen our share of hoaxes over the years. Maybe we’ve fallen prey to one or two, although we’d never admit it in public, and maybe not ever to ourselves. P.T. Barnum’s dictum of ” a sucker born every minute” applies to those other folks sharing our birth-minute, but not us, certainly, savvy minds that we are. But the truth is that we’re all susceptible to get got if we don’t keep a jaundiced eye to the trends sweeping the world wide web and its component apps, a cynical bend that might make us miss out on a bit of fun but at least protects us from looking the fool on occasion.
There are few things that can make us take leave of our senses more readily than sports, and when combined with parochialism and a provincial mindset, a certain mania is loosed within the minds of otherwise sane people. In fans, it leads to tattoos, to drunken parking lot fistfights with opposing fans, to shelling out obscene amounts of money on tickets and merchandise and every bit of ephemera that our favorite teams can churn out to make a dollar off of our insanity. In teams and institutions, it produces a hubris that can lead to a host of decisions ranging from questionable to outright objectionable, and that is being kind in the latter.
In this space I cover a lot of stories pulled straight from the day’s news, often involving multinational corporations and the equivalent level of stars from the entertainment business. All big deals, to be sure, but none could hope to approach the level of status on offer to artists geared to kids. While we as adults have tempered our ideas about the artists themselves, and moderate our consumption of their work, kids have no such notions, and love with a fervor and constancy that many artists could only dream of with their own fans.
New technologies, and the subsequent advances in those new technologies, present new problems, particularly for laws drawn up and passed years, if not decades ago. In fairness, it’s hard to plan for a future that you can’t predict, and you only have to take a look at the portrayals of the future (now our present) in the movies of the past to see how bad we are at guessing how things will shake out. Largely we’ve exceeded our own wildest dreams, though I’m still waiting on my hoverboard from Back to the Future Part II.