Times Must Be Tough: Harvard Becoming A Trademark Troll

from the ask-not-what-you-can-do-for-hah-vahd dept

Vanity Fair recently had a long, but absolutely fascinating article on how Harvard gambled away a big part of its endowment. Even worse, folks at Harvard seemed to think that the annual increases to the endowment were a sure thing, and spent like they were always going to see massive returns. The university is now feeling a pretty massive pinch because of this, and trying all sorts of things to cut costs and bring in more revenue. Apparently, that includes trademark trolling. ChurchHatesTucker points us to the news that Harvard is looking to trademark a bunch of common or well-known phrases, including "Ask what you can do," (based on President Kennedy's famous speech) and "Lessons learned." Not surprisingly, this is raising some free speech questions, concerning the university's right to try to claim some form of "ownership" over these common phrases. The university claims it's just for defensive purposes:

"Since we're spending so much time and money to promote this phrase, we just want to make sure someone doesn't say we can't use it."

Of course, that basically highlights the ridiculousness of the way copyright, patents and trademarks are viewed these days: as something you need to "stockpile" so someone else doesn't get them. Some of the trademark applications are on phrases that Harvard isn't even using:

"You need to reserve something in case you intend to use it," Calixto said. "We're strategically protecting it for use at some point down the line."

And I thought you could only get trademarks on actual use in commerce.

In the meantime, when I started reading the articles linked above, and thought that it would make for a good post, I totally planned to end it by pointing out that people should start getting around these trademarks by referring to the university as "Hah-vahd." Except... the university has an application pending for "The Hahvahd Tour." Oh well...

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Harvard Faculty Agrees To Free Up Its Research

from the about-time dept

While MIT has received plenty of attention over the years for its effort to free up all course materials a potentially equally as interesting move happened at Harvard yesterday, where Arts & Sciences faculty agreed to free up their research. For many years, there's been a push by some to change the process for publishing research. Typically, academic research would appear in journals that were incredibly expensive, potentially limiting the access to that research, even if the research was publicly funded. However, what this group of Harvard faculty have now done is agree that any research they publish will also be available for free online. As mentioned recently, in an age where everyone is so focused on intellectual property, it suddenly makes things like teaching and learning appear to be mighty similar to what others call theft or infringement. It's nice to see some universities starting to push back on that.

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Harvard Bookstore Claims Book Prices Are Copyrighted

from the you-can-claim-it,-doesn't-mean-it's-true dept

A few years ago, we had a story about a store that was kicking people out if they caught them comparison shopping via a mobile device. Obviously, a store can kick out anyone they want to, but perhaps a better approach is to actually focus on better serving the customer so that when they're done comparison shopping, they still want to buy from you (either because you have the best price, or you offer some additional convenience or service they can't get elsewhere). This issue seems to be coming up again, but with a new twist. alex writes in to let us know that the bookstore at Harvard is kicking people out for taking too many notes about pricing (via Boing Boing). When confronted about this, the store's president actually claimed that book prices were the store's "intellectual property." Of course, just because you say something is your intellectual property, it doesn't mean it is. Unfortunately for the bookstore, the law is pretty clear that you can't copyright facts -- and whether the bookstore likes it or not, prices are facts. The store certainly has the right to refuse service to anyone, but that doesn't mean that it's smart for business or that copying down prices infringes on any kind of intellectual property. Update: To clarify, there are apparently a few different bookstores at Harvard. This particular one is the Harvard Coop, run by Barnes & Noble and the University. There is another bookstore, called The Harvard Book Store that is independent and has nothing to do with this story.

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