The Revolution Will Not Be Infringed Upon: Long Island Couple Files To Trademark 'Occupy Wall St.'
from the sticking-it-to-the-man-via-the-proper-channels dept
Wall Street blog extraordinaire, Dealbreaker, alerts us to the perhaps unsurprising news that a Long Island couple has filed for a trademark on the phrase "Occupy Wall Street." (More in-depth information, including the filing, over at The Smoking Gun.):In a U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) application, Robert and Diane Maresca are seeking to trademark the phrase "Occupy Wall St." so that they can place it on a wide variety of goods, including bumper stickers, shirts, beach bags, footwear, umbrellas, and hobo bags.While there's something to be said for striking while the iron is hot, some very ugly backlash from actual Wall Street occupiers is pretty much guaranteed. If there's one thing protesters of a financial system hate (and it's by no means the only thing), it's having their dissent sold back to them. This possibility did cross the Marescas' minds, but it has all been safely rationalized away:
Asked if his move to stake a legal claim to "Occupy Wall Street" might be seen as a crass attempt to cash in on a movement that has a harsh view of corporations and capitalism, Maresca answered, “No.” Noting that he has a "practical business side," Maresca added that, "If I didn’t buy it and use it someone else will."Of course: the I'm-not-the-only-one-with-a-horribly-crass-idea defense. Maresca has a point, though. Someone else would. In fact, a Brooklyn man has already filed a trademark request for "We Are the 99%." Of course, this Brooklynite can always add "44/100" to his T-shirts and sell them to Procter & Gamble, should this occupation suddenly end. Maresca's phrase has no "out," if you will, but he won't let that keep his growth industry down. After all, he's got two things going for him;
authenticity:
Maresca said that he has visited the Wall Street protest site on several occasions and believes that corporations have too much influence on elected officials.and school supplies:
While he has yet to mass produce any “Occupy Wall Street” product, Maresca said that he has inked some t-shirts with magic markers.That, my friends, is how you carpe the hell out of the diem. Now there's nothing left to do but sit back and wait for the backlash/C&Ds to start flying.
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Filed Under: occupy wall street, trademark
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. . . Dude, seriously?
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Not related
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At least...
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If they hadn't tried to register the thing it wouldn't be so bad but trademark? LoL, rly, burn in hell.
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This is an example of greed and that is what OWS does not want to see.I am sure they could of just made t-shirts and no one would of cared but getting a trademark on something you did not create that is a movement shows GREED.
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I don't think so, but they could have just made t-shirts, I suppose.
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A quick question
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Wordage Win
This just definitely became my favorite phrase of the week. Maybe even the month.
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Re: Wordage Win
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This is something that I've been railing against for a while now. The fact that other people are being greedy asshats doesn't mean you are justified in being a greedy asshat. I can at least respect the honesty of a sociopath who will admit that they are just in it for the money, but the person who feels it necessary to attempt to justify their greed with bullshit like this is only showing that they know its wrong but are doing it anyway.
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So wanting money makes you a sociopath nowadays? Ultimately, all the protesters want is money.
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I don't think the reciprocal statement is necessarily true, especially if someone feels bad about their revolting actions. Although I'm not sure which is worse: not having the feelings, or choosing to disregard them.
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The people who do feel the need to justify their greed clearly know that doing unethical things for monetary gain is wrong.
And I wouldn't categorize OWS protesters as being greedy. They don't want more money than they need. They want a fair system where they aren't penalized for not being rich. It's the people who just want more and more no matter how much they attain that are the problem.
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The protesters are not a single group and have no "leader" nor do they have a corporate entity so the most you can do is sue specific people.
Feel free to take them to court, you will only be seen as an ass and help them protest more.
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REALLY?
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A copyright protects an original work; a patent protects an invention; trademark identifies the source of the goods.
It's the difference between owning a word and owning the definition of a word.
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Big media is subject to the higher court, because they have money for lawyers and they are part of the nobility. This sort of protectionism only applies to defenseless individuals without the resources to defend themselves in court.
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If I didn't buy it an use it...
Unfortunately people like Maresca are so busy buying up things before someone else does they don't stop to wonder if they should be able to buy them in the first place. The USPTO is supposed to be guarding the public domain, but have dropped the ball on quite a few fronts lately.
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Serious security concerns
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Re: “...when a man was seen in the park with an assault rifle.”
Yet, point a gun at a representative of the Government, and they have no hestitation in shooting back and jailing or killing you.
Second Amendment = hollow, chest-beating posturing, nothing more.
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maybe to encourage defense for whichever team the Washington Wizards are playing?
Or is that more of a reach than your altering that facilitates an obscure reference to old ivory soap commercials (while another convoluted attempt at humor, it would not even be the trademarked phrase, thus not an "out" to begin with)?
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Perhaps this best explains why the OWS types are doomed to failure, because they too end up supporting the very system they claim to despise.
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If any one person owns this trademark it's a guy from Canada who runs a blog (I forget the guy's name, or his blog's URL).
It was a guy from canada who thought up the whole Occupy Wall Street protests on his blog, and suggested it to his American readers that they start up an 'Occupy Wall Street' protest. His American readers thought it was a great idea, so they started the Occupy Wall Street protests.
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On the other side though, I think this is funny as all get out. I just wish I had thought of it first. ;)
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Adbusters
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Merchandising! Merchandising!
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Re: Merchandising! Merchandising!
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Occupy Wall Street Greek Yoghurt!
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FTFY
while there's something to be said for striking while the irony is hot,
FTFY
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Trademarks, copyright, patents, money. They need to go away.
Yeah, I know. The idea is completely reactionary, but it's true. We need to get rid of money altogether. When the incentive of money is removed and we utilize technology to eliminate poverty, hunger, illness, and want, we'll be free to form a whole new set of incentives that are aligned to improving ourselves through mutual collaboration.
"People working together cooperatively to achieve common beneficiary goals? Madness I tell you!" Progress is hindered today because people only will create something beneficial to us if they can make money from it. If it's not profitable, it doesn't come to fruition. Alternative energy, medical breakthroughs, technology, and agriculture are all hindered from prospering because the costs or lack of profit potential.
Battery technology languishes in unused patents because the oil companies make so much money from their petroleum products and solar/wind/etc. would provide free abundant energy that would make their products irrelevant, but would arguably make life here much more sustainable. It isn't because solar, wind, tidal, and geothermal are impractical. It's because they're unprofitable, but very beneficial to us nevertheless.
Pharma profits from people continually being in need of drugs to fight off and mitigate illnesses. If they found a way to cure disease and death, they'd have no one to sell their drugs to, but people would be healthier and live a lot longer (if not indefinitely).
We have the technology to provide food to everyone on this planet with the resources we already have and no one has to go hungry, but Monsanto wants to be the only source of food in the world so they can rake in all the money and thus, power over all other people.
It's money that is the source of all of our problems and it is money that we need to be rid of to take the power away from those that rule us and treat us like resources to be exploited so they can have their comfortable seat at the top. If you agree and want to be free from the shackles of money (which is just debt slavery in disguise), spread the idea around that money is not conducive to a sustainable society.
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Re: Trademarks, copyright, patents, money. They need to go away.
I'm also curious (genuinely so) as to exactly how you would define each of those four things you propose getting rid of: trademarks, copyright, patents, and money. (Incidentally, I'm with you on copyright and patents, but not trademarks, and definitely not money.)
I think you are not identifying money for what it truly is. I'm not talking about government-backed fiat money, which is what we have and is a very large part of the problem. Real money is simply a tool which allows me to trade efficiently with you by making it so that we don't need to each have exactly what the other desires (known as the "double coincidence of wants"). That is all real money is. If you eliminate money, all you'll accomplish is to make trade more difficult.
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Re: Re: Trademarks, copyright, patents, money. They need to go away.
I think it is that most people don't know what money really is. Civilization did just fine before money came along. When the people needed food, they grew/hunted/gathered it. When people needed shelter, they built it. They didn't bother with money to do this, they just gathered the resources needed and did it. Money is just a tool for controlling access to resources. If you need money, you are a slave to it because in a system that requires money, you can't get what you need unless you have it. Your belief in the necessity for money is one of indoctrination. You've been told all of your life that money is necessary and you take it as fact.
Apes, dolphins, and other intelligent animals already live under a moneyless economy. They help themselves by helping each other to improve each other member's condition. It's a collaborative society versus a competitive one. It was humans that realized they could put themselves ahead by exploiting the many that they could achieve even greater prosperity by using money as the control mechanism. The golden rule applies: "He who has the gold, makes the rules". Money allows people to concentrate that money and thus, consolidate power. So long as money is in use, people will attempt to leverage it to exploit the many and elevate themselves above the rest.
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I certainly agree with you but if you really want to fix the problem you have take it one step at a time not push straight for step 100. Because while it would be wonderful to get the world to drop the ghost of money and just work for the betterment of those around them, I unfortunetetly no longer think, that humanity has it in them without a long long time readjusting how we look at the world and developing a some empathy.
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I saw a Planet Earth episode where the chimps attacked a neighboring band for breaching their territory...and cannibalized those caught. That doesn't sound like collaboration. Sure, they don't have money...but they have territorial pissings.
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They listen to Nirvana?
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Re: Re: Re: Trademarks, copyright, patents, money. They need to go away.
Who exactly is managing the resources? That takes time and effort. Could such a system, which would necessarily be built on top of a dynamic and varying ecosystem for natural resources, really be able to run smoothly and perpetually with no human oversight?
Also, money doesn't only enable efficient trade for the things we need; it also enables efficient trade for the things we want. How would a moneyless (or tradeless) system accommodate people's desires for things not strictly necessary for survival? Who makes the call for whether something is necessary for survival or not? Scarce (finite) resources have limited supply by definition, and if more than one person wants them, those people may not all be able to have all of said resources that they want. Prices and trade (made efficient by real money) allow for an orderly, negotiated, voluntary distribution of scarce resources.
People will still want things that are in limited supply, whether they need them or not. Voluntary trade and dynamic prices make this possible. Unless and until every resource imaginable is effectively infinite, this is how the system works.
As I said before, you still need money, because you still won't have everything you want even if by some extraordinary miracle you do have everything you need. Human desires don't go away. We want stuff. In some cases, we invent stuff. Then other people want that stuff. That's how it's supposed to work. Trade is a core feature of any functioning society, precisely because the resources we all want are finite. There is always a reason to trade unless and until all resources are effectively infinite.
I agree that most people don't know what money really is today, but I disagree with your definition. Money is not a tool for controlling access to resources (that's what property ownership is for, also critical to any society based on scarce resources). Real money is only ONLY a way to facilitate trade more efficiently. I don't want to have to pay you in cows just because you only need cows, because I don't have cows. I only have shoes, but you don't need shoes. So we use silver or gold instead, because it is rare, real, divisible, and easy to identify as authentic. You can use the silver or gold to buy the things that you want, and I can use it to buy what I want. This is what makes it useful as money.
To the degree that "civilization did just fine before money came along" and "they didn't bother with money to [find/use/build what they needed]," they succeeded in spite of the lack of money, not in any way because of it. Do you really think that everybody did everything on their own, without negotiating (key word) with others? Not everyone is good at harvesting raw materials. Not everyone is good at cultivating farmland. Not everyone is good at preparing food. Not everyone is good at making and administering medicine. Trade (and money) allows each person to focus on becoming especially efficient at a subset of skills, which they can then trade with others in exchange for the goods and services they want.
In small, self-sustaining societies, barter is common and can certainly work, since there is usually at least one person to be found in the group who specializes in any necessary skill. Maybe not everything can happen as fast as everyone would like, but there's at least one go-to guy (or girl) for farming, cooking, cleaning, tailoring, doctoring, animal care, and anything else--often even luxury items or services. Such societies may function without money, but the introduction of money (real money, not debt-as-money) can only make things more efficient. Real money is not a government invention; it systematically arises out of a genuine human need. There is a reason that just about every society ever develops some kind of a currency.
Again, this has nothing to do with money. This has to do with the reality of finite resources. The stuff we need and want is not unlimited. Whether we have money to facilitate efficient trade or not, this is still the case. Nobody ever needs money, per se. They need (or want) the stuff they plan to buy with money.
No, it's not indoctrination, it's a solution to a real problem. It's a way to streamline trade, which itself is a way for finite resources to change hands without violence. In a world of limited, scarce stuff, trade is far better than the alternative. Money makes it easy to trade.
They do live in a moneyless economy, true. But if you think that nature is not predominantly competitive, you need to watch some more Animal Planet or National Geographic or something. There is a reason that natural selection and concept of "survival of the fittest" are so universally explained by observing nature. Yes, some groups of animals act together for the protection of the group, but this is hardly altruism. This is an effort to continue their own species. They still have to fight with other animals (often those within their own small group, let alone their species) for the limited resources they deal with, namely territory and food.
As a rule, people will attempt to leverage anything they can to exploit others and elevate themselves above the rest. Money is not necessary to make this happen, and its removal will not prevent it from happening. It will only make voluntary trade more cumbersome, which to me seems more like a step in the wrong direction.
All this being said, I do believe that the fiat money system we have, where the dollar is worth what the government says it is simply because they say it, and new money is constantly introduced into the economy in the form of debt by fractional reserve banking and the Federal Reserve, is absolutely terrible and the source (or at least the enabler) of a huge portion of our problems, and at least most of what OWS is currently protesting, whether or not they can identify it as such. I do believe that money should not be able to affect political outcomes, since then you end up with corporatism, destructive regulations, endless inflation, etc. All bad.
However, the solution isn't to remove money from the equation. That will do nothing. The solution is to remove government power from the equation, so that no matter how much money lobbyists or businesses spend to buy power, there is simply no power for them to buy.
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Tell that to union busting tugs of the past. The power is money, money is power. its a simple formula.
You don't grasp what his proposing because you don't grasp a world so different from what you're used to.
Technology has eliminated all of humanities problems sine the 20's. The reason nothing has changed is because people didn't change with it.
To a few on top, that suits them just fine...
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Re: Re: Re: Re: Trademarks, copyright, patents, money. They need to go away.
There's not enough Hawaii for people? Then technology will expand the supply of tropical land to occupy. So long as the carrying capacity of the Earth isn't exhausted, people can have everything they can put their minds to. Technology adapts to solve every problem. That's what technology does, solves problems.
"Human desires don't go away. We want stuff."
We want stuff only because we have been programmed by advertising and business to want that stuff. It's not human nature, it's conditioning.
"Scarce (finite) resources have limited supply by definition"
Water is finite, but it's not scarce. Highly renewable resources are abundant resources, thus they are not scarce. Scarcity is a tool employed by those that wish to profit.
"There is always a reason to trade unless and until all resources are effectively infinite."
No there isn't. That's just something that has been drilled into your head your entire life to believe without question. That's the model for a competitive culture. One where people try to hold goods as rivalrous. Air and water are not rivalrous. Everyone can have water and air. My having it doesn't diminish your access to it.
"Money is not a tool for controlling access to resources (that's what property ownership is for, also critical to any society based on scarce resources)."
That's not true. Property cannot exist without money. In order for something to be property, an exchange has to be made. Something of yours is traded for something of theirs. Money is not limited to currency. If you exchange labor for land, those are both applicable as money in that particular exchange. Therefore, money blocks people from having that which they need when they don't have the money.
"As a rule, people will attempt to leverage anything they can to exploit others and elevate themselves above the rest."
No, that is a behavior created by competition in a zero-sum economic system. The human mind is adapted to collaborate, not compete. That is why we have language, art, music. Collaboration is what has progressed human society, not money.
"The solution is to remove government power from the equation, so that no matter how much money lobbyists or businesses spend to buy power, there is simply no power for them to buy."
That will only delay the problem. The only real solution is to take away the power of money by taking money out of society altogether.
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How Peer to Peer Communities will change the World – Interview with Michel Bauwens, P2P Foundation founder.: "In my opinion, for-profit companies are inherently non-sustainable in their DNA, because they depend on scarcity, i.e. abundance destroys scarcity and therefore markets; one particular pernicious practice is planned obsolescence. But a open design community has no such perverse incentives and will inherently design for sustainability. It will also design for inclusion, to allow others to add to the design; and finally, it will also conceive more distributed forms of manufacturing, that do not require financial and geographic centralisation."
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Re: Re: Re: Trademarks, copyright, patents, money. They need to go away.
The problems arise when people think that money is wealth and forget that it is actually debt.
Even without money I think that the greedy and unscrupulous would still find a way to exploit the rest of us.
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Re: Re: Re: Re: Trademarks, copyright, patents, money. They need to go away.
But a lot of what Americans buy we don't really need. There are likely enough clothes circulating that as a country we could survive without more. There are so many unoccupied homes that if we moved in together, we might be able to provide housing for everyone who needs it without building more. If every piece of land was turned into a garden, we could do a better job of feeding ourselves.
Americans have gotten themselves in a fix by borrowing money they don't have to buy stuff they don't need. That's again what the sharable movement is all about. We don't have to be exploited if we adjust our lifestyles to fit reality.
The big problem I see is health care. You can greatly reduce your expenses by being healthy, but it is hard to operate on yourself if you need that. There's a level of expertise in health care that is hard to duplicate, though training more nurse practitioners and allowing them to practice would be one way to reduce costs.
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The hippies tried, and they weren't the first. They fail because they are trying to treat the symptoms, though treating the actual problem is a pretty tall order. Good luck with that.
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Also surely some people who considered themselves hippies are rich now, but do you really think the 1% is mostly once hardcore free-loving, drug using, anti-capitalistic activists who simply woke up and realized they couldn't win and should just become everything the fought against?
Or is it that any thoughts of us loving your fellow man and your planet and doing whats best for your fellow man rather then yourself are completely out of touch with reality?
Either way you make most pessimists seem cheery.
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I think the first steps may be to take the corruption out of government by blocking the power that money has on it. If people can't buy buy the government, the rich will have much diminished power. We're going to have to work to phase out money and phase in a resource based economy. If we do it right, me might live to hear the grandchildren of our grandchildren laugh at how backwards we once were.
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You talk about humans living without money before, but society has never lived without some means of trading, and it is that trading that is where the power lies. Whether it is bartering, or currency, or some other system, if I have something others want, then I have the ability to gain power over others.
You can talk about automation to feed, clothe and shelter people, but who is going to build all of that automation? What do they get for their work? Who fixes it when it's broken? What is their recompense when doing so? And assuming automation can work, who decides what is enough? And assume automation makes "enough" for everyone, who decides who gets to live on the beaches of Hawaii and who lives in Oklahoma? There aren't nearly enough beaches for all the people who would like water front access to do so. There are going to be questions of land use, since a lot of that land has to be used for food, but no one really wants to live in Antarctica? And if limiting the population is the answer, who decides who gets to reproduce and how often? If anybody gets to decide the answers to those, and many other, questions, you've given them power over others.
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They get to never want for anything ever again. That's what they get! If free food, energy, healthcare, shelter, and education for life isn't enough for you to do a the work to get you there, then you have the wrong priorities. The thing is, you're going to have to let go of your attachment to material wealth if you want to live in peace and prosperity.
"And assume automation makes "enough" for everyone, who decides who gets to live on the beaches of Hawaii and who lives in Oklahoma?"
A good point, which is another problem to deal with. Maybe technology can solve it, or perhaps higher sensibilities will have to win out. For one thing, holding on to a concept of ownership is anachronistic. You can't own the land beneath you. It's common property. It didn't always belong to someone until those with the concept of property came along the declared ownership of it. The Native Americans thought we were nuts to think we could "own" the land. And not everyone wants to live on the beach or near water, but many would like access to it. With technology, we might not even need Hawaii. We might be able to simulate tropical environments or build recreational facilities. I hear there's lots of room in the middle of the ocean near the equator. Maglev trains can get you there in a short matter of time.
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There are some interesting property issues playing out in the energy wars. Traditionally conservatives have been in favor of property rights, and drilling for oil and gas. As it is turning out, those are clashing. In Colorado, people may own the land, but not the mineral rights, so they are finding that energy companies are drilling on their ranches or in their backyards and they have no say in the matter. In Nebraska, farmers are discovering that a Canadian company plans to laying a pipeline through their property. In Texas cities are discovering that water they wanted to use is going to energy companies instead.
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Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Trademarks, copyright, patents, money. They need to go away.
Absolutely true, some people would rather live off in the mountains, but there are many more people that would like to live in tropical climates with nearby access to recreational water use. So much more people in fact, that there just is not enough tropical recreation water beaches in the world. But who says the people who are already there have to get off. You can't magically make everyone want to share that equally with everyone. Your only recourse then is to force people to share, but that defeats your plan.
Are we talking about doing something now or so many years in the future that your grandchildren will be long gone? Sitting around looking at pictures of Hawaii in a climate controlled room with wave and seagull sounds is a long way off from actually being there. How do you propose simulating scuba diving in some old shipwreck in tropical waters amongst dolphins and fish? Note, I've never done any of that, but it would be awesome, so if you could come up with this soon, I'd be much obliged.
So in order to satisfy my wants, and many others, we're going to further encroach on ocean wildlife, as if our oceanic pollution isn't enough? Or will you use force to stop me from doing that so that we don't encroach any further?
Don't get me wrong. We have lots of problems in the world, and they need to be fixed, but we it needs to be done by limiting the abuse of power, not by dreaming up schemes that only work if everyone everywhere decides to be nice everytime.
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Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Trademarks, copyright, patents, money. They need to go away.
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Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Trademarks, copyright, patents, money. They need to go away.
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Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Trademarks, copyright, patents, money. They need to go away.
You act like everyone will even have the know-how to operate the LHC or that it even will be the only one. There aren't enough people interested in particle physics to overwhelm the availability of particle accelerators. There are also people that want to do other useful things besides particle physics. You're just making arguments on pure hyperbole.
None of this is going to happen overnight. That's unrealistic and a poor attempt to discredit the idea with unrealistic standards. It's going to take time to transition from a currency based economy to a resource based one. The technology needs to be developed, and infrastructure will need to be built. But it's going to have to start with skilled and intelligent people getting together and agreeing that it needs to be done at any cost. The profit motivated money culture is not going to spawn an altruistic moneyless world. Their incentives are completely contradictory.
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Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Trademarks, copyright, patents, money. They need to go away.
This is not exactly true. You can't do command someone to make you a sandwich simply because you have $5. They also have to want your $5 more than they want to keep their time and sandwich ingredients. The same is true for the larger $ value examples.
It's true that without the $5, it is unlikely that someone will make you a sandwich. But having $5 in no way guarantees, all by itself, that someone will make you a sandwich.
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Re: Trademarks, copyright, patents, money. They need to go away.
Could we start small and just break up the current strategy of money=legislation? We could use a different system like, I dunno... voting. One vote per person. That way we could start to make decisions that benefit everyone, instead of those that help themselves.
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Re: Trademarks, copyright, patents, money. They need to go away.
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Re: Re: Trademarks, copyright, patents, money. They need to go away.
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Re: Re: Re: Trademarks, copyright, patents, money. They need to go away.
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Re: Re: Re: Re: Trademarks, copyright, patents, money. They need to go away.
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Re: Re: Re: Trademarks, copyright, patents, money. They need to go away.
You can call those things wants instead of needs, but I see two problems with that:
1) If someone other than me gets to decide what my wants and needs are, then they have power over me.
2) Nobody wants to live with only the very basic necessities.
But I repeat myself. You have to stop looking at wants and needs as two separate categories. There is no such thing as a need in and of itself (ask the people on hunger strikes how much they "need" food vs just wanting it). Your needs are nothing more than wants that are necessary to reach some goal of yours. We call food a need because most of us want to survive. By the same token we call air and water needs. A place to keep the rain off our heads is a need because we want to stay dry. A fire is a need because we want to be warm and we want to have cooked food. Clothes are a need because we want to stay warm, or because we don't want to expose ourselves.
Again, if anybody but me gets to decide that I shouldn't get what I want means that there is power to be had over others, and if that is the case, then your plan doesn't do anything to fix that power = corruption equation.
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Re: Re: Re: Re: Trademarks, copyright, patents, money. They need to go away.
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Re: Re: Re: Re: Trademarks, copyright, patents, money. They need to go away.
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Re: Trademarks, copyright, patents, money. They need to go away.
People are turning backyards and empty lots into vegetable gardens. Installed solar will reduce the need for big power plants. When you have lots of empty houses and lot of broke people, they either team up and share homes or the lived in abandoned ones as they can. Hike the price of gasoline high enough, and people look for cheaper ways to get around. As the cost of medical care continues to rise, people do without so the market for all those new medical inventions shrinks.
The past 30 years of US prosperity has largely been funded by consumer debt. Take that away and the economy will get down to basics pretty fast.
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Re: Trademarks, copyright, patents, money. They need to go away.
People did figure out that they could use money in place of gold and assign value to that. Money is as valuable as people say that it is.
On the hand, we are increasingly living in a world where people don't actually hold gold or money. They just transfer numbers from one computer to another. It's all kind of magic. So we could go back to a gold standard where we are limited by the amount of gold in the world. Or we could go the opposite direction and begin trading things in virtual terms. And that's what the sharable economy is developing into. Computers are facilitating more exchanges that don't involve money at all.
And when you look at the world of high finance, you see that people have been leveraging and using arbitrage to create a world where nothing is actually based on anything. It's a house of cards. We are sort of on the verge of realizing that those on Wall Street don't really control anything other than the physical objects they possess. Once hackers start making war on the financial system and illustrate that there's nothing really there, we may have some interesting repercussions. If the people don't hand over power to those who hold the finances, maybe those people will no longer have the same position in society.
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Re: Re: Trademarks, copyright, patents, money. They need to go away.
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Re: Trademarks, copyright, patents, money. They need to go away.
Yes, there have been Utopian visions over the centuries, and most don't work as planned, but the Internet has changed the way people connect, so there may be new opportunities. Also, the concept of ownership is changing. People are discovering that if they have access, they don't necessarily need to own it. So they are sharing cars, sharing office and living spaces, doing mobile food trucks rather than leasing restaurant space, streaming music rather than buying it, and so on.
And as I mentioned in a different comment, we are learning just how little high finance is based on real money and assets these days. In other words, we're already living in a moneyless economy and all that we have done is to confer power to those who have more numbers in the computer system. As we begin to realize those numbers are not tied to any assets, our whole concept of money may begin to change.
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So now we have a trademark troll.
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Albany NY police mutiny
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Re: Albany NY police mutiny
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Rally together everyone!
Occupy [street|city|state|country|whatever]
Not so good on a t-shirt, but very meta:
Occupy "Occupy [x]" slogans!
Also, have you ever typed/written a word so many times that it doesn't look like a real word anymore? "Occupy" only needed three iterations for that effect to kick in for me.
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Prior Art
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Re: Prior Art
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They forgot to patent it
"A method that allows a body or group of people to occupy a physical space in order to register their approbation of another group of people, or set of social values"
Now when I get my patent, we're going to see a lot of lawyering.
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There's hardly a market for these goods
The trademark holders can try to sue everyone who makes an Occupy Wall St. merchandise maker, but there won't be any money for them to collect and it will give more visibility to the protest.
And I would think it would be hard for them to claim they were they were the first to use the trademark and therefore had any right to ownership.
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