Slashdot Mirror
DOJ Calls EU Microsoft Decision "Unfortunate"
ogma writes "This one is especially ironic after the recent slashdot story on more of Microsoft's underhanded actions coming to light. It seems that the DOJ thinks Europe was too hard on Microsoft in its anti-trust ruling.. According to Assistant Attorney General Hewitt Pate, the fine 'may send the wrong message about antitrust enforcement priorities'..." Open Council writes "The Register points out that the EU has provided Microsoft with a major victory over its Open Source rivals because it will now be allowed to pursue royalty revenue from the APIs it publishes. Jeremy Allison says that the projects such as Samba, which he jointly leads, may face a prohibitive hurdle. The size of the fine is peanuts to MS but will be a bargain if it can lock out Open Source projects from using its API's."
A region is not a person.
A region is not even a method of production.
Champagnes vary amongst themselves as much as Cava and champagne varry. Ditto nearly every other GI product.
If the product produced is the same, then what's left when you peel away the GI onion is bald-faced protectionism. The error in your reasoning is that you are attempting to equate a region with a single entity... it is not by any stretch of the imagination so, except for a geographical accident of being painted the same color on some map. What you are essentially promoting is a sort of racism for products where all products may be equal, but some are more equal than others.
And that's bullshit.
Regarding your statement: "names of Euopean cheeses that have been around for generations", then that's exactly the frickin point: if somebody makes a cheese that is indistinguishable, regardless of where it is made, then it is the same cheese. The people in Hamburg who called some imported cheese "parmesan" cared about taste, not where the hell it came from.
Now, if you raise a stink about Kraft Parmesan, well, that's a product labelling issue, not a GI issue. I might take your side on that one--but it's for a court to decide whether the term "parmesan" has become a common noun effectively meaning "grated" (as it arguably has in the USA) (just like "philly cheese" has been genericized for any soft, spreadable white cheese) or whether kraft's calling it parmesan is an attempt to, effectively, sell an apple as an orange.
GI proponents like to confuse the issue by telling the Kraft Parmesan tale.. but really, that's a sidenote. The real story is not in the small few cases such as that which are really product labelling issues, but in more substantive ones such as Champagne vs Sparkling Wine (etc), basmati rice vs identical non-indian rice, etc.
"PepsiCo" is a company. YOU can make Cola. You can even make it taste like pepsi! But Pepsi is a single purposed actor. A region NEVER WAS.
If I travelled to the good city of Parma, rented some space, and produced something that for all intents and purposes would otherwise be known as Cheddar cheese (a product of Cheddar, UK, only!), would you call this "Parmesan?" No, you wouldn't. Nobody would. If they did, we'd have up to n * m names for cheese, where n is the number of places and m is the average number of cheeses produced in each. That's stupid, illogical nonsense. There is no common noun for "cheddar cheese" other than "cheddar." "Cheddar" describes something generic just like "cola".
If your product is so good that it can be branded, then do so and make a mint. Look at Brut Champagne.
Ergo, any idiot can realize that calling it parmesan refers largely to how it TASTES, not where it's from. Whether it's "largely" or "completely" is debatable, but that point is a minor one compared to the handwaving that you are trying to do.
Now, more to the point: the classic protectionist argument is this: in our land, there is a certain bird that eats a certain berry that grows in a certain in a certain field. this bird shits, and in the resulting manure there grows a tree. that tree is used to make barrels for our special product which is then aged exactly 7 years and 12 minutes in our special barrel. our product is unique because of the essence of the berry that has passed through the bird to the tree to the product.
Such stories are always invented to justify protectionism--in your case, I am sure that the Reggiano Cheese Control Consortium likewise has a book full of spells and incantations that it uses to divine "pure" cheese from foreign muck. This is known as "design regulation"--that is, there are regulations on how an object is designed or made. This is, in a word, bullshit.
Much better is what is called "output equivalence." It says that if an expert cannot tell the difference, or that there is not unreasonable variance between a product that has essence of bird berry shit and one that does not, then the products are the same. A healthy world economy is one where there is output equivalence one basic levels of design regulation (for example, no child labor) are met.
However, I think you completely missed my point about cheddar and in doing so you also supported my argument! the previous poster said that the definition of Parmesan cheese is that it's from Parmeso (or the surrounding area.. whatever). My cheddar counterexample clearly showed that wrong. You further showed the insanity of the GI system by highlighting the fact that it relies on design regulation in order to sustain itself.
I actually agree with you - industrial muck such as Kraft parmesan should probably not be labelled as parmesan any more than a bagel can be labelled a plain donut. but I don't see any reason why an enterprising young albanian (or whatever) who managed through ingenuity and skill to create in his home country a cheese that was for all practical puroses identical to that made in the parma region to sell it as "parmesan" as that has become the COMMON TERM for that kind of cheese. Otherwise, we'd have the m * n problem.