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The Libertarian Blog of Stephan Kinsella
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June 30, 2002
A copyright in silence? (from KinsellaLaw) 
June 26, 2002
Patent Rights Around the World (from KinsellaLaw)
The Tax Cut Party:
A federal judge has declared the Pledge of Allegiance to be an unconstitutional state endorsement of religion because it says, "under God." What's the libertarian stance on this? Well, personally, I don't honestly see how a public school adopting a religious pledge infringes anyone's "rights". You can still be an atheist or Hindu even if the local government schools lead kids in a mindless chant.
But it seems to me we have to keep our eye on the ball. The main state evil is taxes. So do I support abortion or want it outlawed?--it depends on which one will lower my taxes. Do I want drugs legalized?--it depends, will it lower my taxes? Etc. I think we should found a political party dedicated to this proposition: the Tax Cut Party.
June 22, 2002
John Galt in Bed:
Kind of crude, but pretty darned funny: The 25 Most Inappropriate Things An Objectivist Can Say During Sex.
June 21, 2002
Jonah Goldberg's Legal Analysis:
In a recent blog post (The Death of Blogger?), Jonah Goldberg frets about Blogger's possible demise, due to generic uses of the term "blogger". The term is sometimes used to refer to the Blogger service offered at www.blogger.com, and sometimes descriptively--as in "Glenn Reynolds is a leading blogger," etc. Goldberg writes, "Right now millions of people use blogger as a lower case adjective, verb and noun. I blog, you blog, he/she blogs." Horrors! People are using language to communicate!
Jonah notes that "Aspirin was once a Bayer product, now it is the generic name for the drug. DuPont lost Cellophane™ to cellophane and the Otis elevator company once had the exclusive rights to the word Escalator™". He worries that the word "blogger" may become generic, thus causing Blogger to lose its "trademark status." Jonah concludes, "If this keeps up, Pyra Labs--the owner of Blogger--could win the "Blogger Revolution" and go broke at the same time."
Methinks Jonah is trying to sound sophisticated and learned by pretending to know about trademark law; but he badly mangles his case. For one, the way a mark becomes generic is first, a company coins a fanciful, non-descriptive name, like "Cellophane"; the company then uses this mark in commerce to establish common law rights and then obtains a federal registration for the mark. Then, the word becomes used generically to describe any products of the same ilk. Coining the mark comes before genericide, not the other way around. Now I see no reason to assume that "blogger" was coined by Blogger, or that "blogger" is anything other than a descriptive term, or that Blogger has ever had trademark rights in the word.
Blogger does not have a registered trademark, nor even a pending registration, as a quick search on the USPTO's Trademark Electronic Search System (TESS) reveals. All we know is that Pyra labs owns the domain blogger.com, and offers a service that it calls Blogger. It also puts the ™ symbol up by its mark "Blogger" on its site, which actually indicates that it does not have a registered mark (otherwise we'd see the ® symbol). The ™ symbol only means Blogger is trying to hold itself out as claiming some common law trademark rights in the mark "Blogger" that we see on its site. For all we know, the TM symbol indicates the particular stylized design of its mark (the shape and maybe color of the letters etc.).
If Blogger does file an application to register the word mark "blogger", it is likely to run into problems because the word is merely descriptive, IMO. Why would Blogger own a word in common use, just because they name their company after it? If Blogger could own the word blogger, I could start a company tomorrow called "Internet" and thus "own" all uses of that word. I don't know why Jonah thinks the descriptive term "blogger" is protectable as trademark, nor why he thinks Blogger would be the owner of it, nor why he seems to think Blogger coined the term "blog."
As for Blogger's fate if it does not own all trademark rights in the word "blogger"--does he think Blogger depends on a monopoly on the use of the word "blogger" for its success? Doesn't he realize that the spread of the word "blogger" can only help Blogger? Bottom line--Blogger profits by having customers utilize its service, which is offered at the website www.blogger.com. How exactly is the use by others of the term "blogger" in articles etc., going to make Blogger.com go broke?
June 20, 2002
Another cool word:
"Scatterbrain". Added to my list of Annoying and Cool words.
June 16, 2002
More cool words:
Molten, smelted, clack, clamber, trenchant, toddle, and toddy. Added to my list of Annoying and Cool words.
June 14, 2002
Cool Footnote Policy:
Why I like The Greenbag (click "submissions"): "Citations should be accurate, complete, and unobtrusive. Familiar sources need no citation. Authors may use whatever citation form they prefer; we will make changes only to keep footnotes from looking like goulash."
Workaholics:
On my deathbed, just to be a smartass, I plan to say, as my final words, "I wish I had spent more time at the office."
June 13, 2002
BloggerPro:
Have just upgraded to BloggerPro. I like it so far.
June 12, 2002
Libertarian Confusion on Patents:
Cato's Doug Bandow argues in favor of patents on the grounds that lack of patent rights would threaten pharmaceutical innovations. Ironically, Cato scholar Tom Palmer has argued extensively and carefully, contra his boss Bandow, that patents are not compatible with property rights (scroll down; two articles on left side of Palmer's page). I wonder why Bandow ignores his own IP guru's work? I wonder when Cato shifted from being principled, anarchist, natural rights oriented to being minarchist, utilitarian oriented? Maybe they're reading Liberty magazine too much over there.
June 10, 2002
God's Blog: This is sacrilegious, but God's Live Journal is hilarious as all get out. Sample entries: "Did you know that the part of your little brains that controls sneezing is the same part that controls orgasm? I did that on purpose, but I can't remember why. [...] Sometimes I think you don't really love Me, but that you're only saying you do so I will give you cool stuff. I usually feel better after I make a bird or two shit on your car. [...] Medammit I hate doing My taxes. I think this year I'm going to claim you all as My dependents, along with birds of the air, and lillies of the field. I wonder if I should classify Myself as an independent contractor... [...] Just the other day, I needed to call Vishnu to find out what time we were leaving to go see Allah, but I couldn't find his number anywhere. I thought I knew it, but accidentally called Krishna instead. And he's all like, so what are you and Vishnu doing? And I'm like, ummm, nothing really, just hanging out, and it won't be that fun talk to you later. Last thing I need is for that tamborine-slapping freak tagging along with us. I finally got Vishnu on AIM, and he says Allah's pissed because I didn't call him on his birthday, so he didn't want us coming over. Allah gets pissed way too easily. But I called him, and worked it all out by telling him he sure didn't want to get Vishnu mad, because he probably can shoot 50 arrows at once with all those arms of his. Allah was a little confused, but I said Dude, he's Indian, isn't he? And that seemed to work."
Philosophy of Punctuation: For those who get worked up about proper use of commas, dashes, semicolons, and the like, see this fascinating article by Paul Robinson, author of Opera, Sex, and Other Vital Matters.
June 8, 2002
The Bleeping A: Drive: Al Hunt, Mark Shields, Charles Wrangle and Spam email excluded, there are not many things in life more annoying and irritating than the clacking-buzzing noise your PC makes when you accidentally ask it to look in the A: drive. Usually you realize your mistake as soon as you hit "click"; then you have to endure a frustrating agony of 5 or so seconds while you wait for the old A: drive to wake from its slumber and kick up, make a preliminary humming-clicking noise, tentatively blink its red light a couple times, then emit a grinding-crunch as it yelps at not finding a disk in its maw; God, it makes me want to shoot my PC.
Hey wait, did I just say that outloud?
June 6, 2002
Lincoln's Chickens Coming Home to Roost?: Pat Buchanan has an excellent column in today's WND, American roots of 21st-century wars. He argues that Jefferson's revolutionary view that peoples are entitled to "self-determination," that "All governments derive their just powers from the consent of the governed" is in conflict with the logic of Lincoln in the Civil War. "[I]f we are true believers in self-determination, was Lincoln right to send a million-man army to crush a people's rebellion to break free of his Union, as our forefathers had broken free of the British Crown. If America was a "union of free and independent states," why was the South not free to depart?" And these conflicting ideas have been playing out on the world stage since WWI, when "In the name of self-determination, Wilson helped to carve the new nations of Poland, Czechoslovakia and Yugoslavia out of the carcasses of the Russian, German and Hapsburg empires"; but, contrary to the principle of self-determination, in order to dismember Bismarck's Germany "for the safety of France [...], the Saar was put under French control, South Tyrol was given to Italy, 3 million Sudeten Germans were put under Czech rule, a corridor of German land and the city of Danzig were given to Poland, and the Prussian city of Memel was seized from a prostrate Reich by tiny Lithuania." These Lincolnian actions of course helped a nationalistic Hitler rise to power in a humiliated Germany.
As Buchanan points out, states such as Israel, India, Russia, China, and Serbia "confront independence movements by Islamic peoples [e.g., West Bank Palestinians, Kashmir, Chechnya, Sinkiang, Kosovo] who are throwing in our face our own hallowed principle of self-determination, as Hitler did in the 1930s. And there is the same perplexity and moral confusion among Western elites now, as then." Conversely, the states confronting independence movements invoke Jefferson's opposite in their defense: "So, today, in Chechnya, Putin invokes Lincoln as Islamic rebels invoke Wilson and the young slave-owner Jefferson."
June 4, 2002
A War on PTO [Patent Office] Deficiencies? (from KinsellaLaw)
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