There are a LOT of trademarks that include place names. It hasn't stopped the Post Office. Yet. But it has stopped many small business owners from identifying themselves with their location. That is something that is so common across the world that it is - and should be - taken for granted. Unless someone sues you for it first.
It makes no more sense than copyrighting numbers or single letters.
I live in rural Amana, Iowa. If I start a busimess, I can't call it Amana Widget Central, because The Amana Society has the word "Amana" trademarked. It was first used when their commune came to Iowa in 1856. The word itself comes from the Bible - Amana is a place in the Golan Heights in Lebanon. When the corporation was formed in 1932, it acquired all property, separate from the church.
Now that was fine as long as Amana's boundaries were coexistent with the land owned by the Society. But later on, the Post Office redistricted and gave my family's farm an address of Amana.
This has been tested in court by a business in the village of Amana. They lost.
The law needs to be loosened up. Who should be able to own a place name?
They are mostly seen serenely floating high in the sky. But they have to take off and land without any control of which direction they are going. And when they get in a competition, all bets are off.
If a hot air balloon gets above the tree line, the wind takes them where it wants to - same with terrain. I have seen a hot air balloon going up a ravine with half the air bag showing and none of the gondola. The same balloon was following a cow that was running for her life, kicking up her heels over rough terrain, with the occupants shouting "Nice cow! It's OK, cow!"
I have a friend who had an electric fence knocked over by a hot air balloon. He had to put things back to rights before his cattle got out.
But hot air balloons, as well as Bambizilla, have great public images. It's like attacking motherhood and apple pie if you complain about them.
To the commenters who wanted to shoot the drone and beat up the operator, it's a natural reaction. Resist it with everything you've got. Assault is based on what the other person perceives, not on what you do. And if you get charged, then your property is at risk. It's entirely backwards, but so is much of the US legal scenery.
There is someone who makes Gordon Ramsey look reasonable.
I would never put up with his abuse, but then I don't own a restaurant, or even understand why he thinks his style of cooking is the only right one. You'd never keep a family happy with his attitude. Good thing he isn't a Mom.
Just because they can't tell the difference doesn't mean that it should go to an impartial third party (judge sitting in courtroom) for determination of infringement. The **AA knows! [Cue Shadow music.]
There needs to be discovery done on exactly when, where, and how much Mr. Steele has been exposed to dignity. He sure doesn't have any personal experience with it.
If banks value their reputation and want to protect it, then...
How do you explain how Bank of America still exists?
Apparently there are still enough people without scruples willing to trade with them that they can still stick around to stick it to the rest of us. :-(
My imagination is not good enough to figure out how to make a gun out of a cell phone, as a police officer recently declared, but I could make a start at making a gun out of a pencil.
I'd probably break quite a few before i got the hang of it, though. :-)
Wright did a fantastic job. Congrats to him. I wish there were more judges who did this.
---
But -
The judiciary - and the attorneys - have way too much power. And the actual PEOPLE in the court - plaintiffs, defendants and witnesses - have far too little.
Having been in courtrooms as plaintiff, defendant and witness, I can tell you that nobody gets to say what they want unless the judges and/or attorneys allow them to say it.
Plaintiffs and defendants need to be able to tell their story no matter who gets upset about it.
Attorneys need to be forced to tell the truth, with evidence to back up what they say. No more story-telling. Wrigth did that in this case.
---
When the judges runs into a case where there is ambiguity in the law, they need to send it back to Congress for resolution instead of solving it themselves. Until Congress is forced to be accountable to someone, they will continue to crank out more coral reef instead of building bridges.
Farm Bureau says that antibiotic use does not affect any human diseases, so no worries. It's just more of that radical hippie environmental anti-meat nonsense.
I wish I could get insurance somewhere else besides Farm Bureau. [Card-carrying Farm Bureau member who doesn't agree with much besides their insurance rates.]
"because they don't understand how genetics or our food supply works"
Well, that's the problem in a nutshell, isn't it? NOBODY understands how genetics works - YET! If we understood genetics, then we wouldn't be using terms like "junk DNA", which just describes parts of the gene that we can't attribute any function to - YET!
We have made great strides in understanding protein folding, but how those different discrete protein folds work together? Not so much.
And to keep harping on the universally ignored problem - Where is the documentation that GMOs are safe, as is required by the FDA and federal law? Next commment, please address this part of the problem.
The whole reason for GMOs is that it allows large corporations to do a land-grab of the public domain and sequester our common heritage and support of life itself. All for profit. Profit vs. Life. There is no other reason for it. Or perhaps you would like to quantify just exactly how large this cattle safety problem is that GMOs will solve so that we can do a risk analysis and a cost-benefits analysis to see what it is costing us to throw away the public domain?
But corporations don't want to wait for the proper scientific investigation to happen with appropriate isolation until the coast is clear. They want to make money off it immediately.
I am also a Farm Bureau member, and FB is very raucous about the harm caused by "those radicals" who don't want GMOs. So who is spreading the chaos here? Just address the facts, and I'll be happy.
If patents were about methods, then Percy Schmeiser wouldn't have been sued by Monsanto for planting seeds descended from Monsanto Roundup-Ready plants.
I would suggest that there are some factual errors in the claims presented. It pays not to believe everything you read.
The biggest problem is that horned cattle are not as big an issue as the GMO companies would want us to believe. The other problem is that there is a dichotomy in their facts. Sometimes they want us to believe that GMO tech is no different than what has been happening for millenia, other times they want it to be different enough that they can patent it. You can't have it both ways.
Let's look at the state of cattle in the US first. How many horned breed are used in major production? There are polled breeds and there are horned breeds. But it is hard to determine how many horned cattle there are because the polled gene is dominant. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polled_livestock
If I went out in my pasture and counted how many of my renter's cattle had horns, I might find half a dozen, including those shorthorn cows with one short, flattened horn against the skull. Cattlemen have selected against horns for a long time. Cattlemen have also bred for temperament, too, which is a more important characteristic for safety. But unless you are a cattleman, you don't know which physical characteristics to look at to determine temperament.
Here's a list of cattle and which are horned and polled, based on pictures and my observations of who actually keeps breeding stock with horns. Source for breeds and pictures is here: http://www.ansi.okstate.edu/breeds/cattle/
Dairy:
Holstein - polled
Jersey - polled
Brown Swiss - polled
Guernsey - polled
Ayrshire - horned
Less numerous breeds
Beefalo - polled
Belgian Blue - polled
Belted Galloway - polled
Brahman - horned - like pitbulls, used mainly in rodeos
Devon - horned
Dexter - horned
Dutch Belted - horned
Gutch Freisian - polled
Galloway - polled
Gelbvieh - polled
Milking Devon - horned
Milking Shorthorn - polled
Piedmontese - polled
Red Angus - polled
South Devon - polled
So how dangerous are horns? Have any of you had a friend killed by a cow or bull? I have. It wasn't a horned cow, either. Cattle are dangerous with or without horns. Breeding out horns really avoids more property damage, more damage to other cattle, and getting horns caught in chutes and trucks racks. I've never been stepped on by a cow, although a sow stepped on my sneakered foot, and I'm not volunteering for the cow.
Bottom line is that traditional breeding techniques seem to have been working very well, and have already substantially solved the problem that the GMO companies want to re-solve. It's not like every cow has a rack like an Ankole-Watusi or a Madagascar Zebu.
If the GMO companies re-solve the problem, they then get control of the food supply. Is that what you really want? Privatized food supplies, just like the Pharaohs?
----
Question - Is GMO the same as traditional breeding techniques? The GMO companies would have you believe so. And I am not including “in vitro nucleic acid techniques, including recombinant DNA and direct injection of nucleic acid into cells or organelles.” in my definition of traditional breeding techniques. Those have not been used for centuries.
When GMO companies patented their genetic modifications, they claimed that they were different than existing techniques. That got them the patent.
When GMO companies applied for FDA approval of said GMO products, they claimed that they were "substantially equivalent" to existing products.
My question is "Which answer is true?" I am not a moron because I ask this question. I didn't set this situation up. I just want an answer. And while we're at it, I would like copies of any studies done to prove that GMO food is safe. Studies were provided to the FDA in the approval process, but are kept secret because they are trade secrets, despite being patented. The two studies which were doneo n GMOs showed health problems in humans. These studies were attacked (obviosuly) by the GMO companies, but they never offered any of their own studies in evidence. They just said "trust us!". I don't trust them, and the law says that I don't have to trust them. Upton Sinclair helped make sure that our food supply COULD be trusted by NOT trusting the food companies.
Patents are supposed to disclose the method for the advancement of science and the good of the public. Just show me the beef, so to speak, and I'll be happy.
There are a lot of other mis-statements in the article, but they all flow from these two errors, so I won't waste more electrons debating them.
I don't know if sustainable ag can support the population, but it can support the planet, and that is a prerequisite for supporting the population.
Rant independent of your comments:
And most food problems are caused by war and political corruption. Food is hoarded, or it isn't given to certain populations. And sometimes relief organizations aren't allowed in certain parts of a country. Reform the governments and you reform the food problems somewhat.
IFF the planet can be fully utilized can we feed the whole world. What do you think the yields have been in Iraq, Afghanistan, Sudan, and other hot spots around the world? How do land mines affect ag output?
In the organic article, both the author and TechDirt are making a bad assumption - that the volume of crops grown is equivalent between organic crops and modern factory farming. Let me throw in a third method - old-fashioned sustainable agriculture. Organic ag is not always sustainable, especially if it is being done by a corporation. Sustainable ag involves crop rotation, raising grains and livestock (inputs and outputs form a cycle), and processing the crops as much as possible before shipping them.
If you look at the USDA Agricultural Almanac over the years, I am told that you will notice a decrease in nutrient levels from year to year. I grew up on an Iowa farm. As a kid, I helped my Dad feed open-pollinated Reid's Yellow Dent field corn to cattle that we raised. Later on, Dad switched to hybrid corn, bought more corn and fed more cattle. Someday, I'd like to see if I can figure out what the yield of beef per bushel of corn was between those two situations.
I have noticed that grocery stores charge more for "jumbo" fruit, but the flavor is better in smaller fruits. The nutrient level may not be any better in those jumbos, as Mother Nature only has so much to give regardless of the size of the package. Empty calories don't help anybody.
Just remember, most of these studies are being done by corporations with a stake in the outcome. Small farmers don't fund scientific studies, they just find out what works best. It would be nice if the government would fund some impartial studies that looked at the whole spectrum, although I don't think anybody understands it completely yet. If they did, we would understand protein folding and the term "junk DNA" would not be used.
Sex is a wonderful thing. It it hadn't existed, we would have had to invent it.
But sex also correlates with an increase in intimacy. And sometimes that intimacy crashes. I would prefer not to suffer so many crashes. It's a personal choice.
I prefer to call "adult content" "arrested adolescent content". If I can't take it with me through an adult day - at home, in the community, in the office, or anywhere else I, or you, may go - then it isn't truly adult content. Adult sex is something that lasts and improves over time.
Sometimes, sex can be too important to leave to silly, casual, uncommitted encounters. It is so attractive that we can do stupid things in pursuit of it. Thus the occasional reference to "thinking with the gonads instead of the brain".
I will still translate if you don't change, though. :-)
Trademarked place names
There are a LOT of trademarks that include place names. It hasn't stopped the Post Office. Yet. But it has stopped many small business owners from identifying themselves with their location. That is something that is so common across the world that it is - and should be - taken for granted. Unless someone sues you for it first.
It makes no more sense than copyrighting numbers or single letters.
I live in rural Amana, Iowa. If I start a busimess, I can't call it Amana Widget Central, because The Amana Society has the word "Amana" trademarked. It was first used when their commune came to Iowa in 1856. The word itself comes from the Bible - Amana is a place in the Golan Heights in Lebanon. When the corporation was formed in 1932, it acquired all property, separate from the church.
Now that was fine as long as Amana's boundaries were coexistent with the land owned by the Society. But later on, the Post Office redistricted and gave my family's farm an address of Amana.
This has been tested in court by a business in the village of Amana. They lost.
The law needs to be loosened up. Who should be able to own a place name?
Re: Precedents.
Hot air balloons.
They are mostly seen serenely floating high in the sky. But they have to take off and land without any control of which direction they are going. And when they get in a competition, all bets are off.
If a hot air balloon gets above the tree line, the wind takes them where it wants to - same with terrain. I have seen a hot air balloon going up a ravine with half the air bag showing and none of the gondola. The same balloon was following a cow that was running for her life, kicking up her heels over rough terrain, with the occupants shouting "Nice cow! It's OK, cow!"
I have a friend who had an electric fence knocked over by a hot air balloon. He had to put things back to rights before his cattle got out.
But hot air balloons, as well as Bambizilla, have great public images. It's like attacking motherhood and apple pie if you complain about them.
To the commenters who wanted to shoot the drone and beat up the operator, it's a natural reaction. Resist it with everything you've got. Assault is based on what the other person perceives, not on what you do. And if you get charged, then your property is at risk. It's entirely backwards, but so is much of the US legal scenery.
Wrong target. Medicare is insurance
So, once again, it is the insurance companies that are holding back better health care.
Isn't Medicare an insurance program?
I didn't think it was possible
There is someone who makes Gordon Ramsey look reasonable.
I would never put up with his abuse, but then I don't own a restaurant, or even understand why he thinks his style of cooking is the only right one. You'd never keep a family happy with his attitude. Good thing he isn't a Mom.
threatens to cause significant harms that Congress could not possibly have intended.
Translation:
That's not what we told them to do!
Re: Once again
Just because they can't tell the difference doesn't mean that it should go to an impartial third party (judge sitting in courtroom) for determination of infringement. The **AA knows! [Cue Shadow music.]
Speaking of dignity
My irony meter broke.
There needs to be discovery done on exactly when, where, and how much Mr. Steele has been exposed to dignity. He sure doesn't have any personal experience with it.
If reputation of a bank is important...
If banks value their reputation and want to protect it, then...
How do you explain how Bank of America still exists?
Apparently there are still enough people without scruples willing to trade with them that they can still stick around to stick it to the rest of us. :-(
Depends
Can a student turn in a computer-generated paper that is written to the grading algorithm?
It would take some smarts to do that, too. Neither would be satisfactory.
Pencils vs. cell phones
My imagination is not good enough to figure out how to make a gun out of a cell phone, as a police officer recently declared, but I could make a start at making a gun out of a pencil.
I'd probably break quite a few before i got the hang of it, though. :-)
Staples, please send me a gross of pencils!
A deeper problem
Wright did a fantastic job. Congrats to him. I wish there were more judges who did this.
---
But -
The judiciary - and the attorneys - have way too much power. And the actual PEOPLE in the court - plaintiffs, defendants and witnesses - have far too little.
Having been in courtrooms as plaintiff, defendant and witness, I can tell you that nobody gets to say what they want unless the judges and/or attorneys allow them to say it.
Plaintiffs and defendants need to be able to tell their story no matter who gets upset about it.
Attorneys need to be forced to tell the truth, with evidence to back up what they say. No more story-telling. Wrigth did that in this case.
---
When the judges runs into a case where there is ambiguity in the law, they need to send it back to Congress for resolution instead of solving it themselves. Until Congress is forced to be accountable to someone, they will continue to crank out more coral reef instead of building bridges.
That can't be true, can it?
Farm Bureau says that antibiotic use does not affect any human diseases, so no worries. It's just more of that radical hippie environmental anti-meat nonsense.
I wish I could get insurance somewhere else besides Farm Bureau. [Card-carrying Farm Bureau member who doesn't agree with much besides their insurance rates.]
Re: Re: It's difficult to discuss this rationally - for everyone
"because they don't understand how genetics or our food supply works"
Well, that's the problem in a nutshell, isn't it? NOBODY understands how genetics works - YET! If we understood genetics, then we wouldn't be using terms like "junk DNA", which just describes parts of the gene that we can't attribute any function to - YET!
We have made great strides in understanding protein folding, but how those different discrete protein folds work together? Not so much.
And to keep harping on the universally ignored problem - Where is the documentation that GMOs are safe, as is required by the FDA and federal law? Next commment, please address this part of the problem.
The whole reason for GMOs is that it allows large corporations to do a land-grab of the public domain and sequester our common heritage and support of life itself. All for profit. Profit vs. Life. There is no other reason for it. Or perhaps you would like to quantify just exactly how large this cattle safety problem is that GMOs will solve so that we can do a risk analysis and a cost-benefits analysis to see what it is costing us to throw away the public domain?
But corporations don't want to wait for the proper scientific investigation to happen with appropriate isolation until the coast is clear. They want to make money off it immediately.
I am also a Farm Bureau member, and FB is very raucous about the harm caused by "those radicals" who don't want GMOs. So who is spreading the chaos here? Just address the facts, and I'll be happy.
Re: Re: It's difficult to discuss this rationally - for everyone
If patents were about methods, then Percy Schmeiser wouldn't have been sued by Monsanto for planting seeds descended from Monsanto Roundup-Ready plants.
Next objection?
It's difficult to discuss this rationally - for everyone
I would suggest that there are some factual errors in the claims presented. It pays not to believe everything you read.
The biggest problem is that horned cattle are not as big an issue as the GMO companies would want us to believe. The other problem is that there is a dichotomy in their facts. Sometimes they want us to believe that GMO tech is no different than what has been happening for millenia, other times they want it to be different enough that they can patent it. You can't have it both ways.
Let's look at the state of cattle in the US first. How many horned breed are used in major production? There are polled breeds and there are horned breeds. But it is hard to determine how many horned cattle there are because the polled gene is dominant. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polled_livestock
If I went out in my pasture and counted how many of my renter's cattle had horns, I might find half a dozen, including those shorthorn cows with one short, flattened horn against the skull. Cattlemen have selected against horns for a long time. Cattlemen have also bred for temperament, too, which is a more important characteristic for safety. But unless you are a cattleman, you don't know which physical characteristics to look at to determine temperament.
Here's a list of cattle and which are horned and polled, based on pictures and my observations of who actually keeps breeding stock with horns. Source for breeds and pictures is here: http://www.ansi.okstate.edu/breeds/cattle/
The major breeds
Beef:
Angus - polled
Hereford - horned
Simmental - polled
Charolais - polled
Chianina - polled
Shorthorn - horned, but many polled
Polled hereford - polled
Limousin - polled
Dairy:
Holstein - polled
Jersey - polled
Brown Swiss - polled
Guernsey - polled
Ayrshire - horned
Less numerous breeds
Beefalo - polled
Belgian Blue - polled
Belted Galloway - polled
Brahman - horned - like pitbulls, used mainly in rodeos
Devon - horned
Dexter - horned
Dutch Belted - horned
Gutch Freisian - polled
Galloway - polled
Gelbvieh - polled
Milking Devon - horned
Milking Shorthorn - polled
Piedmontese - polled
Red Angus - polled
South Devon - polled
So how dangerous are horns? Have any of you had a friend killed by a cow or bull? I have. It wasn't a horned cow, either. Cattle are dangerous with or without horns. Breeding out horns really avoids more property damage, more damage to other cattle, and getting horns caught in chutes and trucks racks. I've never been stepped on by a cow, although a sow stepped on my sneakered foot, and I'm not volunteering for the cow.
Bottom line is that traditional breeding techniques seem to have been working very well, and have already substantially solved the problem that the GMO companies want to re-solve. It's not like every cow has a rack like an Ankole-Watusi or a Madagascar Zebu.
If the GMO companies re-solve the problem, they then get control of the food supply. Is that what you really want? Privatized food supplies, just like the Pharaohs?
----
Question - Is GMO the same as traditional breeding techniques? The GMO companies would have you believe so. And I am not including “in vitro nucleic acid techniques, including recombinant DNA and direct injection of nucleic acid into cells or organelles.” in my definition of traditional breeding techniques. Those have not been used for centuries.
When GMO companies patented their genetic modifications, they claimed that they were different than existing techniques. That got them the patent.
When GMO companies applied for FDA approval of said GMO products, they claimed that they were "substantially equivalent" to existing products.
My question is "Which answer is true?" I am not a moron because I ask this question. I didn't set this situation up. I just want an answer. And while we're at it, I would like copies of any studies done to prove that GMO food is safe. Studies were provided to the FDA in the approval process, but are kept secret because they are trade secrets, despite being patented. The two studies which were doneo n GMOs showed health problems in humans. These studies were attacked (obviosuly) by the GMO companies, but they never offered any of their own studies in evidence. They just said "trust us!". I don't trust them, and the law says that I don't have to trust them. Upton Sinclair helped make sure that our food supply COULD be trusted by NOT trusting the food companies.
Patents are supposed to disclose the method for the advancement of science and the good of the public. Just show me the beef, so to speak, and I'll be happy.
There are a lot of other mis-statements in the article, but they all flow from these two errors, so I won't waste more electrons debating them.
Evidence they did not tamper with is:
The RIAA does NOT understand digital technology. Or the Internet. Or computers.
Way to go, Team Analog!
Re: Re: Bad assumption
I don't know if sustainable ag can support the population, but it can support the planet, and that is a prerequisite for supporting the population.
Rant independent of your comments:
And most food problems are caused by war and political corruption. Food is hoarded, or it isn't given to certain populations. And sometimes relief organizations aren't allowed in certain parts of a country. Reform the governments and you reform the food problems somewhat.
IFF the planet can be fully utilized can we feed the whole world. What do you think the yields have been in Iraq, Afghanistan, Sudan, and other hot spots around the world? How do land mines affect ag output?
Bad assumption
In the organic article, both the author and TechDirt are making a bad assumption - that the volume of crops grown is equivalent between organic crops and modern factory farming. Let me throw in a third method - old-fashioned sustainable agriculture. Organic ag is not always sustainable, especially if it is being done by a corporation. Sustainable ag involves crop rotation, raising grains and livestock (inputs and outputs form a cycle), and processing the crops as much as possible before shipping them.
If you look at the USDA Agricultural Almanac over the years, I am told that you will notice a decrease in nutrient levels from year to year. I grew up on an Iowa farm. As a kid, I helped my Dad feed open-pollinated Reid's Yellow Dent field corn to cattle that we raised. Later on, Dad switched to hybrid corn, bought more corn and fed more cattle. Someday, I'd like to see if I can figure out what the yield of beef per bushel of corn was between those two situations.
I have noticed that grocery stores charge more for "jumbo" fruit, but the flavor is better in smaller fruits. The nutrient level may not be any better in those jumbos, as Mother Nature only has so much to give regardless of the size of the package. Empty calories don't help anybody.
Just remember, most of these studies are being done by corporations with a stake in the outcome. Small farmers don't fund scientific studies, they just find out what works best. It would be nice if the government would fund some impartial studies that looked at the whole spectrum, although I don't think anybody understands it completely yet. If they did, we would understand protein folding and the term "junk DNA" would not be used.
Anyway, don't believe everything you read.
Re: Re: He's actually correct, in a manner of speaking
I've got a Samsung.
Guess I'd better read the manual to see how to make a weapon out of it. :-)
A suggestion for changing the terminology
Sex is a wonderful thing. It it hadn't existed, we would have had to invent it.
But sex also correlates with an increase in intimacy. And sometimes that intimacy crashes. I would prefer not to suffer so many crashes. It's a personal choice.
I prefer to call "adult content" "arrested adolescent content". If I can't take it with me through an adult day - at home, in the community, in the office, or anywhere else I, or you, may go - then it isn't truly adult content. Adult sex is something that lasts and improves over time.
Sometimes, sex can be too important to leave to silly, casual, uncommitted encounters. It is so attractive that we can do stupid things in pursuit of it. Thus the occasional reference to "thinking with the gonads instead of the brain".
I will still translate if you don't change, though. :-)