The US attorney requirement for foreigners filing trademark applications with the Office is itself a fiasco. I'm on the Ontario-NYS border and tried to file for the US equivalents of my existing Canadian marks just before this bizarre requirement was introduced. It's a simple task that one should be able to do without a lawyer, although occasionally USPTO will return with an "office action" demanding that the list of goods and services associated with the registered mark be modified or narrowed.
Every application for a USPTO registered mark is public info and, because every ambulance chaser out there knows that applicants are being forced to lawyer up for no good reason, I'm getting inundated with all manner of unsolicited e-mail from every lawyer in the country attempting to market their "services".
And why did USPTO do this? Apparently their objection was with a select few "trademark mill" firms who are in the business of claiming to get a US trademark on behalf of individual applicants. When the time came to prove that the registered mark was actually in use, the "proof" that some of these high-volume low-cost registration firms was sending in was often a clipart depiction of the product or even a photo of a competing product. The USPTO didn't like that and (even though the problem was mostly commie China) decided to screw over every non-US applicant by forcing them to waste money obtaining US lawyers.
And the worst of the spam passing as "attorney advertising"? Much of it is coming from the very "trademark mills" who caused the problem in the first place. As long as they can find a US attorney to file their garbage, they're all still in business. It's just the small business or non-commercial applicant, who normally would be "pro se" instead of being lawyered up, who is being screwed by this new regulation - which doesn't solve any of the issues it was intended to address.
Complete waste of time and money. Pity that Canada doesn't do the same thing to US applicants - it would be deserved, but I'm hesitant to write to my local MP to suggest it as it'd still be the little fish (and not huge firms who have already lawyered up) who would encounter the needless extra costs.
If they want to use the fine print and "consent" as a pretext, it's not enough to claim to have the "consent" of the person who owns the device... they need the consent of everyone being spied upon, which would be everyone in the bar. They don't have that. Lock 'em up.
If they want to use the fine print and "consent" as a pretext, it's not enough to claim to have the "consent" of the person who owns the device... they need the consent of everyone being spied upon, which would be everyone in the bar. They don't have that. Lock 'em up.
The same issue appears with first name-last initial, as adding letters to the end of given names can awkwardly modify them. The most common issue is that a stray trailing -a -e or -o can misgender a name. For instance, Simon E. says that his name is not Simone. Same issue with Carl A. or various boy names which merely take the ladylike version of a name and truncate a trailing -a or -e, so Juan is the boy version of the ladylike Juana.
And then there's the joke about the hardnosed new boss who walks into some stuffed-shirt office demanding to be addressed as "sir" and to address his workers by their last names only. So what is your name? "That's Mr. Jonathan Darling to you, sir."
Perhaps governments should be legally prohibited from using slogans like "express yourself" (or its variants) to promote vanity plate schemes, as they're false and fraudulent advertising. The government is not allowing the ratepayers to express themselves.
Dr. Todd Calhoun’s, an anaesthesiologist at North York General, was given vanity licence plate FENTANYL by his spouse at the turn of the millennium. At the time, “It was not a drug of abuse out there, it was not a street drug. It was a hospital drug, as it should be.”
A couple of decades later, after greedy drug manufacturers had managed to get the dangerous drug onto prescription pads, from which it ended up on the streets - killing people - that plate was causing enough problems that the good doctor complained to MTO himself to get the plate revoked and replaced with another - DR DORMIR (français: Dr. Sleep). Apparently a drug dealer approaching him and his family offering prescriptions was the last straw.
There are plenty of bizarre place names like https://en.wikivoyage.org/wiki/Places_with_unusual_names which probably wouldn't have seen the light of day were they submitted as vanity plate applications. (Wikipedia has another, similar list.)
For instance, "Sheshatshit" is harmless in Labrador's native Innu community, where the native language pronounces it "sheshajeet", but it gets enough odd looks from anglophones that the natives would likely be prone to give up at times and just spell it "sheshatsiu" to stop the laughter.
Look up "Scunthorpe problem". Automated censor algorithms are infamous for blocking this sort of thing, so I have no idea whether this post will see the light of day...
You shouldn't have to sneak into the US just to cast a vote for one or another candidate, when it's possible to direct the outcome without leaving Moscow.
Oh dear, an emergency. Wikivoyage really needs to update their [[United States of America]] article to warn voyagers of the peril:
{{warningbox|This country is currently experiencing a state of emergency; please reconsider plans to travel or choose another destination as the situation continues to degrade...|lastedit=2019}}
There's nothing prohibiting organised crime from obtaining copyrights, nor preventing them from trolling, much as there is nothing preventing a 1%'er motorcycle club from using trademark to coerce some comic book company to rename a character from "hell's angel" to "dark angel". For that matter, Mein Kampf was copyrightable material - although that status recently expired.
If that's the standard, firearms are also tools that enable abuse and the US really needs to stop exporting the entire contents of the 2nd Amendment hardware store to odious régimes in Arabia.
I remember seeing something on the news about some extremist group, I think they said they were ISIL, or ICE, or ISIS or something like that. I wasn't really paying attention closely at first until they described these extremists as a terrorist front which takes little kids away from their mummies and daddies. I thought we bombed bad countries where people do things like that?
We've run the US census again, but this time excluding all of the illegal immigrants.
The total lawful population of the US is 2,423,531 including 281069 Cherokee, 269202 Navajo, 108272 Sioux and 105907 Chippewa but excluding all of the illegal immigrants and their descendants, who will be herded back onto the Mayflower and shipped back to wherever they came from.
Hope that helps. :)
The US attorney requirement for foreigners filing trademark applications with the Office is itself a fiasco. I'm on the Ontario-NYS border and tried to file for the US equivalents of my existing Canadian marks just before this bizarre requirement was introduced. It's a simple task that one should be able to do without a lawyer, although occasionally USPTO will return with an "office action" demanding that the list of goods and services associated with the registered mark be modified or narrowed.
Every application for a USPTO registered mark is public info and, because every ambulance chaser out there knows that applicants are being forced to lawyer up for no good reason, I'm getting inundated with all manner of unsolicited e-mail from every lawyer in the country attempting to market their "services".
And why did USPTO do this? Apparently their objection was with a select few "trademark mill" firms who are in the business of claiming to get a US trademark on behalf of individual applicants. When the time came to prove that the registered mark was actually in use, the "proof" that some of these high-volume low-cost registration firms was sending in was often a clipart depiction of the product or even a photo of a competing product. The USPTO didn't like that and (even though the problem was mostly commie China) decided to screw over every non-US applicant by forcing them to waste money obtaining US lawyers.
And the worst of the spam passing as "attorney advertising"? Much of it is coming from the very "trademark mills" who caused the problem in the first place. As long as they can find a US attorney to file their garbage, they're all still in business. It's just the small business or non-commercial applicant, who normally would be "pro se" instead of being lawyered up, who is being screwed by this new regulation - which doesn't solve any of the issues it was intended to address.
Complete waste of time and money. Pity that Canada doesn't do the same thing to US applicants - it would be deserved, but I'm hesitant to write to my local MP to suggest it as it'd still be the little fish (and not huge firms who have already lawyered up) who would encounter the needless extra costs.
No, they're "asking" the wrong person for consent
If they want to use the fine print and "consent" as a pretext, it's not enough to claim to have the "consent" of the person who owns the device... they need the consent of everyone being spied upon, which would be everyone in the bar. They don't have that. Lock 'em up.
No, they're "asking" the wrong person for consent
If they want to use the fine print and "consent" as a pretext, it's not enough to claim to have the "consent" of the person who owns the device... they need the consent of everyone being spied upon, which would be everyone in the bar. They don't have that. Lock 'em up.
Lucky they don't do this to the names of towns
The same issue appears with first name-last initial, as adding letters to the end of given names can awkwardly modify them. The most common issue is that a stray trailing -a -e or -o can misgender a name. For instance, Simon E. says that his name is not Simone. Same issue with Carl A. or various boy names which merely take the ladylike version of a name and truncate a trailing -a or -e, so Juan is the boy version of the ladylike Juana. And then there's the joke about the hardnosed new boss who walks into some stuffed-shirt office demanding to be addressed as "sir" and to address his workers by their last names only. So what is your name? "That's Mr. Jonathan Darling to you, sir."
Re: Ontario - FENTANYL - Yours to discover!
https://www.thestar.com/news/gta/2017/05/03/toronto-doctor-gladly-gets-rid-of-fentanyl-vanity-licence-plate.html
federal plates?
Want Canadian federal licence plates? That's easy. Drive defensively: Buy a tank! Army vehicles have federal plates. They are otherwise rare.
there aught to be a law
Perhaps governments should be legally prohibited from using slogans like "express yourself" (or its variants) to promote vanity plate schemes, as they're false and fraudulent advertising. The government is not allowing the ratepayers to express themselves.
Re: Dr. Beaver
... or the Catholic preacher Cardinal Sin.
Ontario - FENTANYL - Yours to discover!
Dr. Todd Calhoun’s, an anaesthesiologist at North York General, was given vanity licence plate FENTANYL by his spouse at the turn of the millennium. At the time, “It was not a drug of abuse out there, it was not a street drug. It was a hospital drug, as it should be.”
A couple of decades later, after greedy drug manufacturers had managed to get the dangerous drug onto prescription pads, from which it ended up on the streets - killing people - that plate was causing enough problems that the good doctor complained to MTO himself to get the plate revoked and replaced with another - DR DORMIR (français: Dr. Sleep). Apparently a drug dealer approaching him and his family offering prescriptions was the last straw.
Lucky they don't do this to the names of towns
There are plenty of bizarre place names like https://en.wikivoyage.org/wiki/Places_with_unusual_names which probably wouldn't have seen the light of day were they submitted as vanity plate applications. (Wikipedia has another, similar list.)
For instance, "Sheshatshit" is harmless in Labrador's native Innu community, where the native language pronounces it "sheshajeet", but it gets enough odd looks from anglophones that the natives would likely be prone to give up at times and just spell it "sheshatsiu" to stop the laughter.
Look up "Scunthorpe problem". Automated censor algorithms are infamous for blocking this sort of thing, so I have no idea whether this post will see the light of day...
Re: Could we fit all the people that support Trump into Montana?
Oh, and what did Rachel Notley do wrong to deserve this problem to be dumped on Alberta's borders?
Re: undocumented voters?
You shouldn't have to sneak into the US just to cast a vote for one or another candidate, when it's possible to direct the outcome without leaving Moscow.
Re: Not the only one
There's a Lorne GRABHER in Nova Scotia facing a similar issue with his Austrian patronym: https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/nova-scotia/lorne-grabher-wins-750-from-province-amid-battle-over-licence-plate-1.4718837 Only difference was that his family already had the plate (him, and his father before him) only to have the province try to revoke it.
So where's the wikivoyage.org {{warningbox}}?
Oh dear, an emergency. Wikivoyage really needs to update their [[United States of America]] article to warn voyagers of the peril:
{{warningbox|This country is currently experiencing a state of emergency; please reconsider plans to travel or choose another destination as the situation continues to degrade...|lastedit=2019}}
Not the only one
Eat your heart out mafia
There's nothing prohibiting organised crime from obtaining copyrights, nor preventing them from trolling, much as there is nothing preventing a 1%'er motorcycle club from using trademark to coerce some comic book company to rename a character from "hell's angel" to "dark angel". For that matter, Mein Kampf was copyrightable material - although that status recently expired.
tools that enable abuse?
If that's the standard, firearms are also tools that enable abuse and the US really needs to stop exporting the entire contents of the 2nd Amendment hardware store to odious régimes in Arabia.
Re: IP Law
No, you're not allowed to use the dictionary word "monopoly" as it's subject to a Hasbro trademark. See you in court.
what? who? they all sound the same
I remember seeing something on the news about some extremist group, I think they said they were ISIL, or ICE, or ISIS or something like that. I wasn't really paying attention closely at first until they described these extremists as a terrorist front which takes little kids away from their mummies and daddies. I thought we bombed bad countries where people do things like that?
illegal immigration?
We've run the US census again, but this time excluding all of the illegal immigrants. The total lawful population of the US is 2,423,531 including 281069 Cherokee, 269202 Navajo, 108272 Sioux and 105907 Chippewa but excluding all of the illegal immigrants and their descendants, who will be herded back onto the Mayflower and shipped back to wherever they came from. Hope that helps. :)