Bloomberg does another deep dive into the Trump Too Small trademark case. A t-shirt vendor wanted to trademark the slogan. The trademark office correctly rejected the trademark because the vendor hadn’t acquired a license from Trump to use his name. The 5th circuit overturned, citing the meaningless and nonexistent “free speech”. Now the Supremes are handling the case but haven’t given a decision yet.
A patent lawyer who has argued cases in both of the relevant courts fills in the details. The 5th circuit, which wanted to grant the trademark, was ignoring the basic PURPOSE of all property registration. Most of the Supremes, both R and D, appear to understand the PURPOSE correctly.
Intellectual property is the same as houses or cars. Registering ownership of a thing lets you block other people from stealing or using it. Blocking is the SOLE purpose of property. “Authorship” and “freedom” are irrelevant. Owning a car doesn’t give you the freedom to crash it into other cars; it only gives you legal protection when somebody steals the car.
The authorship myth gave us the absurd concept of automatic copyright, manufactured by Disney in 1996. Authorship also gives us the idiotic NFTs. When you “own” an NFT you have the privilege of possessing one particular mention of the actual image or text. Your mention is registered so you can prevent others from reciting this particular mention. You do NOT have the privilege of blocking anyone from using the actual image or text, and you do NOT have the copyright that lets you make copies of the actual thing, so you don’t have ANY FUCKING THING AT ALL. NFT = NO FUCKING THING.
Before the bitcoin lunacy, nobody would have considered a mention of an object to be valuable. Writing and registering an opinion about an artwork or a hotel doesn’t let you steal the painting or the hotel.
Here’s an opinion: “I think my neighbor’s Cadillac is wonderful.” Now that I’ve written the opinion and published it in this blog, it is automatically registered by the absurd Disney version of copyright. Therefore, in the NFT world, I can steal the neighbor’s Cadillac without legal consequences.
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