Intellectual? Property? Rights?
Trademarking the syllable D’Oh — which 20th Century Fox has done — seems to make each word of the phrase “intellectual property rights” somehow wrong.
It must be noted, however, that D’Oh is not the worst offender among trademarked sounds. Who knew, for example, that Federal Signal Corporation (what is that?) had a trademarked sound or that it appeared on the US Patent and Trademark Office kid’s page? And the list goes on of forgettable chimes, tones, beeps, horns, dings, as well as the William Tell Overture. It’s amazing how much time lawyers seem to have on their hands to cause mischief.
Our question is this: has James Lileks trademarked Yeagh!, which might actually be worth doing?
March 21st, 2007 at 8:56 am
The Constitution authorizes patents and copyrights as a means to “to promote the progress of science and useful arts.” In large and increasing measure, this mechanism for incentivizing progress has been perverted into a means for impeding it.
Maybe the immediate roots of the problem are in the 1970s and 1980s when Japan et al took unimplemented American research and turned it into highly competitive inexpensive products. In response, the legal system was ajusted to prevent this from happening again (which was apparently fine with Japan once it had become a developed country); such special-interest adjustments became more drastic when the Internet took off. It’s not surprising that these solutions have spawned new problems with serious implications for the nation’s future.