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... artificial meat

Have you ever tried SPAM®?

Yes, although if you aren't from Hawaii, you aren't supposed to admit it.

... artificial meat

Have you ever tried SPAM®?

You donate your money, and they remove the previously promised turkey and replace it with Spam on December 23. Would these same morons argue that Spam was better for you at that point?

They promised turkey. They delivered SPAM brand turkey. I fail to see the problem, unless you're trying to say they delivered the pork variety.

I heard MyCleanPC will remove Slashdot beta!

For a second I thought you were referring to a real American food the tinned spiced ham product.

You are a great writer. I found this article very informative. Would you like to be buying genuine spam today?

I think they were the one's really pushing for this patent.

Spam http://www.spam.com/games/Museum/default.aspx

We came across it by accident, and having seen it would have planned to had we known.

Does it seem odd to anyone else that you're arguing over the precise definition of a word that was stolen from a comedy sketch about a canned meat product? A word which even in the context of unwanted electronic messages has evolved since its original use regarding a couple of lawyers on Usenet? It wasn't even about email in the first place.

No. Spam is whatever Hormel says it is. If you want to apply the term to email you're going to have to live with a nebulous definition.

Please stop responding to SPAM. If no one responds to it, then they won't make any money and they'll stop.

You have a very simplistic view of the vast world of spam (which, by the way, should not be written in all capital letters). Spammers can make money from spam, without anyone ever buying anything from them.

Rule #1: spammers lie. Spammers can offer to advertise your product on a double-opt-in targeted mailing list, for a fee. Once you've paid them up front, of course, they send out spam to every address they've scraped off the web, then quietly disappear while an angry mob runs you out of business. In theory, the spammers should be able to get away with this trick without ever actually sending any spam at all, but it's probably a lot easier to prosecute them for that.

It seems you think spam is always all caps. All-caps spam is a trademark of the makers of that lunchmeat: http://www.spam.com/about/internet.aspx

the U.S. government can't seem to figure out which companies are responsible for the SPAM

Everybody knows that Hormel is responsible for the delicious SPAM lunchmeat.

Oh, you meant the spam. Nevermind.

the U.S. government can't seem to figure out which companies are responsible for the SPAM

Everybody knows that Hormel is responsible for the delicious SPAM lunchmeat.

Oh, you meant the spam. Nevermind.

The official SPAM site has it all caps as well.

"Is this thing on? Tasting, tasting, 1, 2, 3... SLURP!" -Tommy Smothers, Smothers Brothers LIVE at the Purple Onion

"In a nation-wide taste test, ICAAN's hamburgers were named the best in the country. Tasters said the burger had a certain "je ne sais quoi." In other news, scientists have identified "je ne sais quoi" as a lack of rat feces"
-Misquoted from Alex Fossella

"How does your Domain Taste??" -Digg on domain tasting

"But I don't LIKE spam!" -'Woman' in Monty python skit about the taste of spam.com

"A domain is the place that someone has people who work for them take care of. There's four kinds of domains: Domain of the King, Domain of the [insert name of some kind of Lord of the Rings monster here], Domain of the Public, and Domain of the Name. They have long been sought after by those in positions of power, such as kings or wiki creators. When it comes to domains, it's pretty much like this: in the right hands, everything is peachy. But in the wrong hands, vampires crawl from the bowels of the Earth and feast at our eyeballs." -Uncyclopedia on Domains

"Taste is the Greek god of individual preference. Inbred son of Zeus and Apollo, Taste usually governs endless and pointless debates between retarded entities on internet forums. In sculptures and various other artworks he is depicted wearing a bean flavoured cape and ice-cream shoes, holding a banana-like sceptre." -Uncyclopedia on taste

"Absolute catholicity of taste is not without its dangers. It is only an auctioneer who should admire all schools of art." -Oscar Wilde on taste

"Domain tasting is the practice of a domain name registrant using the five-day "grace period" at the beginning of the registration of an ICANN-regulated second level domain to test the marketability of the domain." - Wikipedia on Domain Tasting

"On the streets these days, a dime bag of kittens costs a pretty penny." - Oscar Wilde on slashdot's Offtopic moderation

Maybe the guy from Hormel wasn't a part of the Spam fun. Hell, go to the Spam website and you can tell that it's all a bit tongue in cheek about the whole thing.

There's even a Spam museum in Austin, MN, which is I believe where it's first Spam factory is.

Actually most people at Hormel do have a good sense of humor about it. I'm actually from the small town (Austin, Minnesota) where the canned meat is made. They realize they have an odd product that is the butt of a lot of jokes and have gone out of their way to play it up. Just check out their website, a 15 second look around their site should clue you in that they have some sense of humor. http://www.spam.com/

I suspect they're doing it to be cute, and it's probably just recipes contributed by google employees. Here's the link to Hormel's take on it: http://www.spam.com/legal/spam/

For those of you interested in the origins of the name, wikipedia refers to him as a 'founder-hero'.

It think I've seen people catching spam on tv, just not the kind you're talkin' 'bout. http://www.spam.com/

I'm talking about their content; entire shows, movies, etc. being out there for free. No advertising revenue! "Hey, we were number one on YouTube! Yeah, well your commercials were cut out of the show/movie...but, we were number one!"

And i'm talking about blip-verts, short 3min segments, like the "Colbert Report" from the daily show. I'm sure there are whole shows available on youtube, not that i've seen any. I have seen short segments which from time to time resulted me taking the time to watch a show, rent/buy a vid.

There might be a slight market because of product placement in the content but that won't cut it with the companies they rely on for advertising revenue. Where is the revenue for Viacom and their sponsors? Free publicity does not cut it for a company that has already made their place in the world.

If your logic was true, then Coca-Cola and Pepsi wouldn't need to advertise. Oscar Meyer wouldn't need the weiner-mobile, and Hormel Foods wouldn't need a spam-mobile. But they still do. Why? Keeps demand up... otherwise a competitor's advertising might might make something think "perhaps i'll give this drink a shot" or "this tastes good, I think I might buy some"

If your logic was also true, then Viacom already has achieved the maximium market share, meaning no room for growth, and only a fool would invest in them. But in terms of cable stations, I believe the "USA network" (NBC/universal) is #1 in terms of viewers. And it just so happens I got into Monk by watching short clips on Youtube.

http://www.answers.com/topic/viacom
http://www.answers.com/topic/nbc-universal-inc
http://www.answers.com/topic/fox-entertainment-gro up-inc
http://www.answers.com/topic/time-warner-inc

Viacom has their place in the world, but they are no Time/Warner, closer to NBC-Universal which just so happens to have a deal with Youtube If they hope to reach the level of NBC-universal, it might be wise to consider youtube as a vehicel for promoting their media.

To put into perspective, google's net income is about 1/10th that of viacom.
http://www.latimes.com/business/la-fi-google1feb01 ,1,1371599.story?coll=la-headlines-business

We are not talking about Viacom it self, but rather the content they provide. Everyone for example knows "Kraft" or "safeway", but you do not know every product they sell. Your average American, for example, doesn't know what Vegemite(tm) is though it is a Kraft product. Viacom does spend much airtime and advertising dollars to promote programing. Something like the Dailyshow isn't watched by everyone, pretty popular for a cable show, about 1.5 million viewers nightly. How many more people do you think would watch it if they caught brief blip-verts sent to them in their inbox by friends. How much more likely would it be for something to enter into foreign markets based on this free advertising. Your clearly a hard sell on this idea, I can only speak from experence.

If I was a shareholder of any media company, I would be concerned if Viacom didn't offer blip-verts like NBC does, and hell i'd drop them like a rock if they didn't adapt. Just like the VCR served to increase popularity of cable by providing a signal good enough to tape.

1) Person with VCR tapes HBO
2) Person shares tape
3) Person gets HBO, watches and tapes.
The effect is virual and was vital to the groth of the cable industry.

Viacom needs to be reminded that their present growth was due in part to viral pirate marketing.

They don't n

And now we can make green SPAM as well
http://www.spam.com/

So you gotta ask - do the people at Hormel get unsolicated email?

SPAM is the "meat". Spam is email. Get your technical terms right d:

We do not object to use of this slang term to describe UCE, although we do object to the use of the word "spam" as a trademark and to the use of our product image in association with that term. Also, if the term is to be used, it should be used in all lower-case letters to distinguish it from our trademark SPAM, which should be used with all uppercase letters.

Actually, on the official SPAM web site, there is actually a link to the official Spamalot web site. I guess the people at Hormel Foods do have a sense of humor.

We do not object to use of this slang term to describe UCE, although we do object to the use of the word "spam" as a trademark and to the use of our product image in association with that term. Also, if the term is to be used, it should be used in all lower-case letters to distinguish it from our trademark SPAM, which should be used with all uppercase letters.

Most telling from Hormel's spam site

We do not object to use of this slang term to describe UCE [Unsolicited Commercial Email), although we do object to the use of the word "spam" as a trademark and to the use of our product image in association with that term. Also, if the term is to be used, it should be used in all lower-case letters to distinguish it from our trademark SPAM, which should be used with all uppercase letters.

Hormel has chosen not to fight this as agressively as perhaps they should have . .

Well, the reason it's called a "trade mark" and not a "trade name" is that it's allowed to just be a shape. For example, it may well be that there are lots of references to things being 3 meters long (3m) in the net, but 3M's logo doesn't come into jeopoardy as a result of that...

I have to wonder if this suit would have been decided differently if Google's search were strictly case-sensitive. For example, a search for marks that are multiword or that contain characters that google thinks are word breaks or even that are not characters at all will be thwarted by this.

Another possibility is that Hormel's IP lawyers made an ineffective case, failing to cite some of the ways that a Google search might not tell the whole story, or might bias the result.

At least one argument I'd have raised is that any word that managed to catch on (requiring little more than it be short and pronounceable) would have certainly been the dominant Google search result when the issue in question is "the informal name for something that occurs in our mailboxes more than anything else on earth". That is, did they take into account the fact that people mention what they see, and that there's more email spam than virtually anything else just because there's so much spam, not because spam didn't get the word out?

A thought exercise: If we'd decided to call spam something else, like "coke", would Coke have lost its trademark? How zealously has Coke defended itself against the illegal drug trade calling its product "coke"? If Coke gets more hits, I suspect it's not because Coke has more zealously defended its name, I suspect it's because it tastes better than SPAM.

So if we make a graph of the tastiness of the item in question and plot whether it's trademark protected even in the case that it had become the common name for spam, would we find that everything on the "not very tasty end and hence not much talked about or sold" got a "no" and everything on the "very tasty and hence highly deployed" got a "yes". Is this "tastiness step function" the definition of what it takes to be protected as intellectual property?

I think Hormel correctly protected its mark by identifying that in a particular form of use, they asserted control, and that the common use was to be distinguished. Barring the use purchase of a large number of armed soldiers world-wide, something thankfully out of the purchase power of even most corporations, I don't see how they could control what the world does. And I thought trade mark law was about telling people what they could and couldn't do, not about telling corporations when they have and haven't spent their precious marketing dollars correctly.

Most telling from Hormel's spam site

We do not object to use of this slang term to describe UCE [Unsolicited Commercial Email), although we do object to the use of the word "spam" as a trademark and to the use of our product image in association with that term. Also, if the term is to be used, it should be used in all lower-case letters to distinguish it from our trademark SPAM, which should be used with all uppercase letters.

One can't have it both ways . . . allowing people to misuse or use trademarks in a way that confuses or dilutes the popular meaning and expecting full protection of the trademark. In fact I may get flamebaited modded for this, but I am a bit surprised to see many of the posts from the /. community side with the government protected corporate controlled trademark people instead of the more populist spam definition that grew out the grassroots computer user community.

Perhaps this docile reaction from the /. community is because Hormel chose not to protect their trademark as aggressively as they could have . . . Unfortuately this would be a lesson to corporations. Trademark dilution is something that could happen . . . if they aren't agressive and vigilant.

The European Office of Trade Marks and Designs, noting that the vast majority of the hits yielded by a Google search for the word made no reference to the food...

SPAM search

And what is the first item listed, you ask? Why WWW.SPAM.COM - From Hormel Foods Corporation. Includes history, fan club, and facts. I'm pretty sure Hormel has had to fork over a lot of money to keep them at the top of any search for SPAM, to keep the trademark from being wiped away.

Now that this is nested deeply into legal stuff, let's make it complete: SPAM and spam aren't the same thing:

SPAM vs. spam

On top of that, most in the anti community would go deeper than the UCE, which spam is supposed to represent.

UCE = Unsolicited Commercial Email

UBE = Unsolicited Bulk Email

Don't think there's a difference? Wait for the '08 election. You'll find plenty of policitally oriented charged UBE.

BTW, politically flavored UBE is legal under U-CAN-SPAM 2003.

they do in fact don't like it details: http://www.spam.com/ci/ci_in.htm

why do companies keep on doing stupid things with capitalisation?

Hypothesis #1: It makes judges more likely to find that the company has been diligent in protecting its exclusive rights in its marks. (Trademarks have much stronger use-it-or-lose-it requirements than copyrights or patents, which rely on laches.) A trademark in danger of becoming generic may be distinguished from the generic term through capitalization, such as SPAM luncheon meat vs. spam e-mail.

Despite all the rumors about Google and how it will topple Microsoft,

I thought .biz meant spam (lowercase) and .hormel.com meant SPAM (uppercase).

So true. http://www.spam.com/ci/ci_in.htm

My apologies to the Hormel company. I'll expect to see the FBI, FDA, CIA, and some other 3 letter agency at my door at any time for misusing their trademark on SPAM.

Human error is not an option anymore.

Whatever is decided should probably be done in conjunction of the Ajax landsharks.

I'm surprised they haven't taken a stand on this and posted it on their web site.

Here's an example:

Hormel decided to decide how Spam and SPAM would be used +/- tolerated: SPAM Internet Site Terms.

Bottom line: Jesse may use one of this three wishes on this: (according to Jesse, not meant to be an acronym), but it may not come true.

Hormel is really the ONLY company that can legitimately do something about the problem of SPAM®

It's spam or Spam. Not SPAM.

There isn't any trademark problems with DSPAM?
SPAM is a registered trademark of Hormel Foods Corporation, and DSPAM aren't the Monty Python.

No, this is almost like asking SPAM to solve the food shortage in Africa.

Artificial protein has been around for ages and never gets old. Amazing!

Judging by the way my ceremonial can-o-Spam reacts to a magnet, I would say Irony.

Not SPAM , spam . (Be careful of the ownership issues.)

Personally, I think a better technique would be to:

-- route a copy of every piece of email to a single, highly scaled server.
-- use the markup tags <ESP> and </ESP> (prepend and append) to make the email accessible via the sixth sense.
-- hire the Psychic Friends Network to sit around and let contents of the ESP-text seep into their brains. They won't be slowed down by reading them or using a keyboard.
-- they'll easily sort out the innocent messages from the criminal ones.

It certainly isn't any less accurate or efficient than what he's proposing.

Without a doubt the most Spammed state is Hawaii.

I think that in this case, "pretty well established" is probably a correct term, but I also think it is a mistake.

The question is not why unwanted email was originally named "spam". The question is why the term was immediately adopted and enthusiastically used by so many people.

The people who named it "spam" and the people who adopted the term so easily and with such popularity were probably older people, not teenagers or people in their early twenties. I say that because I believe the formula for Hormel Foods SPAM has changed. I tried SPAM in the 50's. Even as a child I was disgusted by the fat in SPAM then. So, when I first heard the word "spam" associated with unwanted email, I completely understood and agreed wtih the reference.

If unwanted email had been named "foot stomp", I might have recognized the reference to the Monty Python TV show, but I would not have adopted the term myself.

I remember trying a bite of Hormel Foods SPAM several years ago, and I was surprised that it was not disgusting. That's why I think that the formula was changed.

Someone, please look on a can of Hormel Foods SPAM and post a comment with the total calories per serving and the number of fat calories per serviing.

Funny official statement from Hormel Foods : Let's face it. Today's teens and young adults are more computer savvy than ever, and the next generations will be even more so. Children will be exposed to the slang term "spam" to describe UCE well before being exposed to our famous product SPAM. Ultimately, we are trying to avoid the day when the consuming public asks, "Why would Hormel Foods name its product after junk e-mail?"

It actually is a portmanteau for "Spiced Ham". Research a bit on SPAM's home for details.

I think that in this case, "pretty well established" is probably a correct term, but I also think it is a mistake.

The question is not why unwanted email was originally named "spam". The question is why the term was immediately adopted and enthusiastically used by so many people.

The people who named it "spam" and the people who adopted the term so easily and with such popularity were probably older people, not teenagers or people in their early twenties. I say that because I believe the formula for Hormel Foods SPAM has changed. I tried SPAM in the 50's. Even as a child I was disgusted by the fat in SPAM then. So, when I first heard the word "spam" associated with unwanted email, I completely understood and agreed wtih the reference.

If unwanted email had been named "foot stomp", I might have recognized the reference to the Monty Python TV show, but I would not have adopted the term myself.

I remember trying a bite of Hormel Foods SPAM several years ago, and I was surprised that it was not disgusting. That's why I think that the formula was changed.

Someone, please look on a can of Hormel Foods SPAM and post a comment with the total calories per serving and the number of fat calories per serviing.

Funny official statement from Hormel Foods : Let's face it. Today's teens and young adults are more computer savvy than ever, and the next generations will be even more so. Children will be exposed to the slang term "spam" to describe UCE well before being exposed to our famous product SPAM. Ultimately, we are trying to avoid the day when the consuming public asks, "Why would Hormel Foods name its product after junk e-mail?"