When I was in law school, if you were running a Windows machine, you were required to let them install their "security suite" (including Norton) before you could connect to the network. But if you were running Linux, it just let connect.
Another point you might want to consider is that statutory damages are calculated per infringed work. So even if U.S. law somehow applied in Mexico, you couldn't multiply by the number of albums sold. Off the top of my head, the maximum statutory damages are $150k per infringed work (feel free to correct me if I'm wrong). So assuming a nice, round 10 songs on the album, the maximum statutory damages would be $1.5M. That's not exactly chump change, but it's at least three orders of magnitude less than the silly numbers being tossed around in the summary.
If you release it and don't tell someone it's patent pending, they can copy it and won't have to pay royalties till the patent comes out. If you put patent-pending on it, you can go to them for retrospective royalties once your patent comes out.
No, it's not. You can't copyright the functional aspects. In fact, your schematic is just barely copyrightable itself, since its primarily functional. But you put some creativity in how you arrange the pieces and things like that, so you manage to clear the copyright hurdle. While I'm not aware of specific case law, I think it's questionable whether a raw netlist would be copyrightable. That is just the raw facts of which terminals are connected to which nodes. In any case, the functional facts of which pieces to use and where they connect are not copyrightable, so your circuit is not a derivative work.
If I buy from you a book, and make a copy of said book, that is OK.
No, as belmolis pointed out, that would be copyright infringement.
But if I then sell the copy, then I have infringed on your copyright license to me.
Again, no. When was the last time you saw a license agreement on a book? You have purchased a copy of the book. You don't need a license, because you have no reason to make a copy of the book. You just read it. The reason software comes with licenses is because you make copies of the program on your hard drive and in memory.
If you release it and don't tell someone it's patent pending, they can copy it and won't have to pay royalties till the patent comes out. If you put patent-pending on it, you can go to them for retrospective royalties once your patent comes out.
Well, sort of. If you don't have a patent yet, anybody can make it, whether or not you mark it "Patent Pending." The pending application doesn't give you any exclusive rights. "Patent pending" puts them on notice that you are seeking a patent, meaning "if you make this, you're just generating market share for me." DustyShadow is right. It doesn't give you the right to sue anybody. But conversely, you can't call it "patent pending" until you have actually filed a patent application. If you want to get the reasonable royalty, you need to send them a copy of the published patent application with the published claims (and then hope that you're able to keep those claims through prosecution).
I could create software, hardware, an image, a document, an audio recording, it doesn't matter as soon as I create it and release it somehow I automatically get my rights to it. If someone were to copy it, regardless of weather or not I held a patent, I could raise legal action against them (unless I had already released it under a particular license which granted them use).
Yes, absolutely. But that still doesn't get you where you need to be. For example, let's say that I invent a brilliant new circuit, and do up a nice schematic of it. I have a copyright in that schematic. Maybe I'll even register my copyright. And if you copy the schematic, you infringe my copyright. But if you get a copy of my schematic and build the actual circuit, you have not infringed my copyright. The only way I can keep you from building the circuit is by patenting the circuit.
The company I am a part of provides such development services as well, and I'm fairly confident if the author claims his system is as simple as he states it is we could have developed it for him into a product for less than $5,000US and in less than a few months.
You ought to send me your contact info. I sometimes have inventors who need that kind of service. It's nice for them to have options. Contact info.
If you go to ILM or Pixar or Disney, remember that they probably won't sign your NDA. They may have their own NDA that they'll sign, but it won't be very friendly to you. It will quite possibly say, "We have every right to rip off your idea and use it without the smallest compensation unless you actually get a patent on it." This protects them because they may already have a guy in the back room working on the same technology before you ever show up. If your patent doesn't work out, they don't want to deal with you if they end up using this technology (and if it does, you don't need the NDA).
Find a VC if you can, and then with the money, you can hire a management team and bring in the lawyers. But bottom line is you need capital for your primary business of living, and that may mean doing something more mundane in the meantime. I'm sure your idea is brilliant, but you've still got to eat. The smartest guy I've ever had in my office was completely broke because he'd spent 10 years of his life developing a brilliant technology that is way ahead of its time. He has an issued patent now, but as far as I know, most creditors don't accept patents as a form of remuneration. Maybe someday he'll be rich. If brilliance matters, he certainly deserves to be. But as far as I know, he still isn't.
You forgot Step 0: Read the employment agreement of your prospective employer. It's entirely possible that if you don't do this, and you follow steps 1 -- 6, step 7 will be "Watch your employer profit and get a hearty pat on the back and a 'Job well done!'"
Okay, I'm going to be a little anal here. Nothing personal, just trying to make sure that only the best and most precise information is showing up on Slashdot.
Now, I have one question and please don't take this the wrong way: if you system is so simple it would take only a few weekends to build yourself, why is it taking you so long to develop?
Development usually takes a lot longer than following somebody else's directions.
.... If you just filed for a patent you should be patent-pending soon
If he just filed a patent application, then his thing is "patent pending." As soon as you file, you can call it that.
which means even if you sell kits or samples the users of your kits/samples will not be able to mass produce all they want - patent pending alone is enough to bring up and win a court case.
Um, no, that is absolutely not true. You cannot sue on a patent until it issues. Before it issues, you don't even know what the claims are going to be when they issue. In most cases, they get amended during prosecution. So until your patent issues, you can't sue anybody, much less win. There is one thing to be aware of. Once your application is published, if you put a potential infringer on notice of your pending application and if it then issues with substantially the same claims as the ones that were publishes, then after it issues and you sue them, you will be able to get a reasonable royalty going back to when you put them on notice. But you still can't actually sue until the patent issues.
Also, you don't really need a patent to copyright or license your idea, so why not do that now?
You can't copyright an idea. You can copyright your description of it, but that doesn't prevent somebody from reading that description and implementing the same idea. It just keeps them from copying your description. Copyrights and patents are not interchangeable.
I'm a patent attorney, but this post is not legal advice. It's for entertainment purposes only. In other words, if you use a post on Slashdot as legal advice and things go badly for you, (1) you deserve whatever you get, and (2) don't try to sue me.
I agree, if you're talking about patents. I was talking about copyright because the GP was talking about "poor man's copyright." But I probably should have been more clear (that's one of the reasons I am sure to say that my posts aren't legal advice). Even there, you may want to pay an attorney the first time or two, just to see how to fill in the blanks right.
But no, don't try to file a patent application yourself. That's a recipe for disaster. You'll just end up paying me even more money to fix the mess. The one exception is if you're just wanting to create proof that you had an idea by a certain date. In that case, you may want to send your write up in to the patent office as a provisional and pay the filing fee ($105). Just remember you're creating evidence, not writing a patent.
The thing about gerrymandering is that it tends to be self-correcting over time. The party in power will draw lines that are carefully crafted to give them the most seats. That means that you divide the opposition among the various districts to dilute their power. The problem is that when you do this, you tend to create close districts. It doesn't take a great big shift in popular opinion to turn a slightly-Democrat-leaning district into a slightly-Republican-leaning district. It's not perfect, but it tends to work over time.
but it will cost about $10,000 to get a patent attorney to prepare the application for you.
A little exaggerated. I usually charge around $2,500 for a provisional. A non-provisional will run closer to $7,000 to $10,000.
If you don't spend that money to get the wording right, you may as well not bother.
That's absolutely true if your concern is getting a usable patent application. But I was talking about the case where some guy is thinking, "I'm going to send this to myself in the mail to prove the date of invention." If you're going to do that, scan it as a PDF, submit it to the USPTO online and pay the $105. No, it's not much good as a patent application, but it's GREAT as proof that you had a particular idea on a certain day.
Actually, they would both be a problem. The friend's wife doesn't even have to go around telling everyone about it. If she's using it for its intended purpose in public, even though nobody can see it, it's still public use. It's really not hard to trigger a bar date. The best advice is to just file now.
To supplement what you're saying a little (this is not legal advice, so nobody rely on it), from a patent prosecution perspective, there is really no downside to doing a search. You want the best art you can find in front of the examiner, because as you said, it raises a strong presumption that your invention is patentable over that art once it issues. Even if you're thinking, "I'll just remain blissfully ignorant of the prior art so the patent office can't cite it against me," you're really not helping yourself. In the best case scenario, OK, you get a patent, and good for you, there's no inequitable conduct. You were never obligated to do a search anyway. But the whole point of a patent is it gives you the right to sue somebody when they infringe. Problem is, as soon as you sue, the defendant will be scouring the world for prior art. The defendant is going to find that reference you would have found. It's much better to find the reference yourself, and then draft your claims around the reference. Now let the bad guys find it. You've already factored it into your claims.
And from a willful infringement point of view, I still tell my clients that they're better off knowing what's out there and what they're up against. Seagate has made it harder to make out willful infringement on somebody who just had a bare knowledge of the existence of the patent. So my casual, non-legal advice that nobody should rely on is go ahead and search the prior art and talk to your attorney about what you find.
Also be sure to hire a registered patent attorney (he or she should have a USPTO registration number). Even if your attorney does other IP work, or is a successful patent litigator, if he's not registered, it's illegal for him to file your patent application, or even help you prepare an application to file for yourself. I'm not surprised that Joe Public doesn't always know this, but I am surprised at how many general practice attorneys don't. A good place to start is the USPTO's Attorney/Agent Search Page, where you can find a patent attorney in your area. Or you can just hire me, of course:-)
Another point: The poster seems to have confused patentability and infringement. Basically, if your idea is new, non-obvious and useful, it's patentable, whether or not it infringes another patent. For example, if you came up with a brilliant improvement to Google's search algorithm, you could get a patent on it, even though you would infringe Google's patent if you implemented it.
The best practical way would be to have a totally dis-interested 3rd party attest to a statement of fact describing the invention and have it notarized.
If it's really important, it ought to be worth the $105 to file it as a provisional patent application. Then there is no question that you were in possession of the invention, whatever it may be, as of that date. It may not be detailed enough to be much use as a real application, but at least it's irrefutable evidence that you had the idea at a certain point.
And if you've written the Great American Novel and you're afraid of it getting ripped off, the filing fee is a whopping $35, and you can do it all online by filling out a form.
The patent system is seriously flawed, as the obviousnless requirement for an invention is generally ignored.
I think you have some really good points, but I have to disagree with me on this one. Try prosecuting a patent, and watch the examiner pull little elements of your claims from totally unrelated fields of art and mix them together in a blender and call it "obviousness," and then say that again with a straight face. My experience as an actual honest-to-goodness patent attorney is that many examiners use obviousness as a crutch to toss out a rejection without having to work too hard. And it's not really all their fault. The "count" system gives them ridiculously short turnaround times for an office action. I'm just hoping the new Commissioner, Kappos (who is himself an honest-to-goodness patent attorney) will improve the mess that Dudas left. Dudas had neither the technical ability nor the required credentials to so much as write a patent application, and it showed.
Ah, well, obviously there are no bigots in England (or the U.S. or Canada) except for fundamentalist Christians. What was I thinking?
Seriously, all you folks who think that religion accounts for all the bigotry in the world need to get out of Mom's basement and open your minds a little.
It's not that absurd. I remember a case in law school where a yarn company got a registration for lavender-scented yarn. (Before everybody gets hopping mad about "prior art" and "copyrights", remember that this is a trademark and would only prevent you from selling lavender-scented yarn, and possibly thread, knitting needles, or other closely-related stuff. You're still okay to have a flower garden).
That is, suppose my company has a splatter of paint on a board as symbol, like a Jackson Pollock painting. I could trademark THAT SPATTER, but I could not under any currently known legal doctrine trademark all splatter paintings made by my clients, even if making splatter paintings happened to be part of the schtick I used to market my business.
Kinda depends, actually. While you can't trademark the process of making a splatter, and your trademark won't prevent others from making splatters of paint for their own amusement (even if it's identical to yours), your trademark would prevent somebody from using a confusingly-similar splatter to sell their goods or services. The fact that the two splatters are different when compared in detail doesn't really matter. It's more about the general impression of the "consuming public" (who are not assumed to be super bright).
What you said was that fundamental Christianity was "one of the last and greatest bastions of hatred and bigotry left in the world." That is a singularly narrow-minded position. You are saying that if all the fundamentalist Christians were gone, there would be little to no hatred or bigotry in the world. That statement is ludicrous on its face (and like I said, it reeks of bigotry---"Those evil Christians are the only bigoted people around"). There are lots of bigoted and hateful people in the world. Yes, some of them are fundamentalist Christians (though I'm not aware of any Christians who practice the Law of Moses, so any who claim Leviticus 20:13 as authority for killing gays would have to call themselves fundamentalist Jews or something). But Lots of them are also Muslims, and Jews, and Buddhists, and Hindus, and atheists, and agnostics, and liberals, and progressives, and whites, and blacks, and hispanics, and Italians, and any other group you want to pick. The point that you are missing entirely is that you are brazenly claiming not only that all fundamentalist Christians are categorically bigoted and hateful (are you seriously saying, with a straight face, that that's not a bigoted viewpoint?), but also that fundamentalist Christians have a near monopoly on hatred and bigotry. What that seems to imply is that you have an extremely narrowly-focused and irrational hatred of fundamentalist Christians that causes you to classify them all as bad, and to ascribe all (or at best, most) bad in the world to them. Now tell me again, why is that not a bigoted point of view?
Fundamentalist Christianity is, however, one of the last and greatest bastions of hatred and bigotry left in the first world.
You need to get out more. There is plenty of hatred and bigotry to go around in the world, and if all the fundamentalist Christians disappeared off the face of the earth tomorrow, that wouldn't change. In fact, that statement itself reeks of hatred and bigotry.
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When I was in law school, if you were running a Windows machine, you were required to let them install their "security suite" (including Norton) before you could connect to the network. But if you were running Linux, it just let connect.
Another point you might want to consider is that statutory damages are calculated per infringed work. So even if U.S. law somehow applied in Mexico, you couldn't multiply by the number of albums sold. Off the top of my head, the maximum statutory damages are $150k per infringed work (feel free to correct me if I'm wrong). So assuming a nice, round 10 songs on the album, the maximum statutory damages would be $1.5M. That's not exactly chump change, but it's at least three orders of magnitude less than the silly numbers being tossed around in the summary.
If you release it and don't tell someone it's patent pending, they can copy it and won't have to pay royalties till the patent comes out. If you put patent-pending on it, you can go to them for retrospective royalties once your patent comes out.
No, it's not. You can't copyright the functional aspects. In fact, your schematic is just barely copyrightable itself, since its primarily functional. But you put some creativity in how you arrange the pieces and things like that, so you manage to clear the copyright hurdle. While I'm not aware of specific case law, I think it's questionable whether a raw netlist would be copyrightable. That is just the raw facts of which terminals are connected to which nodes. In any case, the functional facts of which pieces to use and where they connect are not copyrightable, so your circuit is not a derivative work.
If I buy from you a book, and make a copy of said book, that is OK.
No, as belmolis pointed out, that would be copyright infringement.
But if I then sell the copy, then I have infringed on your copyright license to me.
Again, no. When was the last time you saw a license agreement on a book? You have purchased a copy of the book. You don't need a license, because you have no reason to make a copy of the book. You just read it. The reason software comes with licenses is because you make copies of the program on your hard drive and in memory.
If you release it and don't tell someone it's patent pending, they can copy it and won't have to pay royalties till the patent comes out. If you put patent-pending on it, you can go to them for retrospective royalties once your patent comes out.
Well, sort of. If you don't have a patent yet, anybody can make it, whether or not you mark it "Patent Pending." The pending application doesn't give you any exclusive rights. "Patent pending" puts them on notice that you are seeking a patent, meaning "if you make this, you're just generating market share for me." DustyShadow is right. It doesn't give you the right to sue anybody. But conversely, you can't call it "patent pending" until you have actually filed a patent application. If you want to get the reasonable royalty, you need to send them a copy of the published patent application with the published claims (and then hope that you're able to keep those claims through prosecution).
I could create software, hardware, an image, a document, an audio recording, it doesn't matter as soon as I create it and release it somehow I automatically get my rights to it. If someone were to copy it, regardless of weather or not I held a patent, I could raise legal action against them (unless I had already released it under a particular license which granted them use).
Yes, absolutely. But that still doesn't get you where you need to be. For example, let's say that I invent a brilliant new circuit, and do up a nice schematic of it. I have a copyright in that schematic. Maybe I'll even register my copyright. And if you copy the schematic, you infringe my copyright. But if you get a copy of my schematic and build the actual circuit, you have not infringed my copyright. The only way I can keep you from building the circuit is by patenting the circuit.
The company I am a part of provides such development services as well, and I'm fairly confident if the author claims his system is as simple as he states it is we could have developed it for him into a product for less than $5,000US and in less than a few months.
You ought to send me your contact info. I sometimes have inventors who need that kind of service. It's nice for them to have options. Contact info.
No problem. Your check's in the mail. I postdated it for "the day after the GNU Hurd port of Duke Nukem Forever ships."
If you go to ILM or Pixar or Disney, remember that they probably won't sign your NDA. They may have their own NDA that they'll sign, but it won't be very friendly to you. It will quite possibly say, "We have every right to rip off your idea and use it without the smallest compensation unless you actually get a patent on it." This protects them because they may already have a guy in the back room working on the same technology before you ever show up. If your patent doesn't work out, they don't want to deal with you if they end up using this technology (and if it does, you don't need the NDA).
Find a VC if you can, and then with the money, you can hire a management team and bring in the lawyers. But bottom line is you need capital for your primary business of living, and that may mean doing something more mundane in the meantime. I'm sure your idea is brilliant, but you've still got to eat. The smartest guy I've ever had in my office was completely broke because he'd spent 10 years of his life developing a brilliant technology that is way ahead of its time. He has an issued patent now, but as far as I know, most creditors don't accept patents as a form of remuneration. Maybe someday he'll be rich. If brilliance matters, he certainly deserves to be. But as far as I know, he still isn't.
You forgot Step 0: Read the employment agreement of your prospective employer. It's entirely possible that if you don't do this, and you follow steps 1 -- 6, step 7 will be "Watch your employer profit and get a hearty pat on the back and a 'Job well done!'"
Now, I have one question and please don't take this the wrong way: if you system is so simple it would take only a few weekends to build yourself, why is it taking you so long to develop?
Development usually takes a lot longer than following somebody else's directions.
.... If you just filed for a patent you should be patent-pending soon
If he just filed a patent application, then his thing is "patent pending." As soon as you file, you can call it that.
which means even if you sell kits or samples the users of your kits/samples will not be able to mass produce all they want - patent pending alone is enough to bring up and win a court case.
Um, no, that is absolutely not true. You cannot sue on a patent until it issues. Before it issues, you don't even know what the claims are going to be when they issue. In most cases, they get amended during prosecution. So until your patent issues, you can't sue anybody, much less win. There is one thing to be aware of. Once your application is published, if you put a potential infringer on notice of your pending application and if it then issues with substantially the same claims as the ones that were publishes, then after it issues and you sue them, you will be able to get a reasonable royalty going back to when you put them on notice. But you still can't actually sue until the patent issues.
Also, you don't really need a patent to copyright or license your idea, so why not do that now?
You can't copyright an idea. You can copyright your description of it, but that doesn't prevent somebody from reading that description and implementing the same idea. It just keeps them from copying your description. Copyrights and patents are not interchangeable.
I'm a patent attorney, but this post is not legal advice. It's for entertainment purposes only. In other words, if you use a post on Slashdot as legal advice and things go badly for you, (1) you deserve whatever you get, and (2) don't try to sue me.
Don't worry. As soon as the topic turns to space elevators, I will be just brimming with half-informed opinions.
I agree, if you're talking about patents. I was talking about copyright because the GP was talking about "poor man's copyright." But I probably should have been more clear (that's one of the reasons I am sure to say that my posts aren't legal advice). Even there, you may want to pay an attorney the first time or two, just to see how to fill in the blanks right.
But no, don't try to file a patent application yourself. That's a recipe for disaster. You'll just end up paying me even more money to fix the mess. The one exception is if you're just wanting to create proof that you had an idea by a certain date. In that case, you may want to send your write up in to the patent office as a provisional and pay the filing fee ($105). Just remember you're creating evidence, not writing a patent.
The thing about gerrymandering is that it tends to be self-correcting over time. The party in power will draw lines that are carefully crafted to give them the most seats. That means that you divide the opposition among the various districts to dilute their power. The problem is that when you do this, you tend to create close districts. It doesn't take a great big shift in popular opinion to turn a slightly-Democrat-leaning district into a slightly-Republican-leaning district. It's not perfect, but it tends to work over time.
but it will cost about $10,000 to get a patent attorney to prepare the application for you.
A little exaggerated. I usually charge around $2,500 for a provisional. A non-provisional will run closer to $7,000 to $10,000.
If you don't spend that money to get the wording right, you may as well not bother.
That's absolutely true if your concern is getting a usable patent application. But I was talking about the case where some guy is thinking, "I'm going to send this to myself in the mail to prove the date of invention." If you're going to do that, scan it as a PDF, submit it to the USPTO online and pay the $105. No, it's not much good as a patent application, but it's GREAT as proof that you had a particular idea on a certain day.
Actually, they would both be a problem. The friend's wife doesn't even have to go around telling everyone about it. If she's using it for its intended purpose in public, even though nobody can see it, it's still public use. It's really not hard to trigger a bar date. The best advice is to just file now.
To supplement what you're saying a little (this is not legal advice, so nobody rely on it), from a patent prosecution perspective, there is really no downside to doing a search. You want the best art you can find in front of the examiner, because as you said, it raises a strong presumption that your invention is patentable over that art once it issues. Even if you're thinking, "I'll just remain blissfully ignorant of the prior art so the patent office can't cite it against me," you're really not helping yourself. In the best case scenario, OK, you get a patent, and good for you, there's no inequitable conduct. You were never obligated to do a search anyway. But the whole point of a patent is it gives you the right to sue somebody when they infringe. Problem is, as soon as you sue, the defendant will be scouring the world for prior art. The defendant is going to find that reference you would have found. It's much better to find the reference yourself, and then draft your claims around the reference. Now let the bad guys find it. You've already factored it into your claims.
And from a willful infringement point of view, I still tell my clients that they're better off knowing what's out there and what they're up against. Seagate has made it harder to make out willful infringement on somebody who just had a bare knowledge of the existence of the patent. So my casual, non-legal advice that nobody should rely on is go ahead and search the prior art and talk to your attorney about what you find.
Also be sure to hire a registered patent attorney (he or she should have a USPTO registration number). Even if your attorney does other IP work, or is a successful patent litigator, if he's not registered, it's illegal for him to file your patent application, or even help you prepare an application to file for yourself. I'm not surprised that Joe Public doesn't always know this, but I am surprised at how many general practice attorneys don't. A good place to start is the USPTO's Attorney/Agent Search Page, where you can find a patent attorney in your area. Or you can just hire me, of course :-)
Another point: The poster seems to have confused patentability and infringement. Basically, if your idea is new, non-obvious and useful, it's patentable, whether or not it infringes another patent. For example, if you came up with a brilliant improvement to Google's search algorithm, you could get a patent on it, even though you would infringe Google's patent if you implemented it.
Plus, the cost of a real registration is only $35. Seriously, how hard up do you have to be?
The best practical way would be to have a totally dis-interested 3rd party attest to a statement of fact describing the invention and have it notarized.
If it's really important, it ought to be worth the $105 to file it as a provisional patent application. Then there is no question that you were in possession of the invention, whatever it may be, as of that date. It may not be detailed enough to be much use as a real application, but at least it's irrefutable evidence that you had the idea at a certain point.
And if you've written the Great American Novel and you're afraid of it getting ripped off, the filing fee is a whopping $35, and you can do it all online by filling out a form.
The patent system is seriously flawed, as the obviousnless requirement for an invention is generally ignored.
I think you have some really good points, but I have to disagree with me on this one. Try prosecuting a patent, and watch the examiner pull little elements of your claims from totally unrelated fields of art and mix them together in a blender and call it "obviousness," and then say that again with a straight face. My experience as an actual honest-to-goodness patent attorney is that many examiners use obviousness as a crutch to toss out a rejection without having to work too hard. And it's not really all their fault. The "count" system gives them ridiculously short turnaround times for an office action. I'm just hoping the new Commissioner, Kappos (who is himself an honest-to-goodness patent attorney) will improve the mess that Dudas left. Dudas had neither the technical ability nor the required credentials to so much as write a patent application, and it showed.
Ah, well, obviously there are no bigots in England (or the U.S. or Canada) except for fundamentalist Christians. What was I thinking?
Seriously, all you folks who think that religion accounts for all the bigotry in the world need to get out of Mom's basement and open your minds a little.
It's not that absurd. I remember a case in law school where a yarn company got a registration for lavender-scented yarn. (Before everybody gets hopping mad about "prior art" and "copyrights", remember that this is a trademark and would only prevent you from selling lavender-scented yarn, and possibly thread, knitting needles, or other closely-related stuff. You're still okay to have a flower garden).
That is, suppose my company has a splatter of paint on a board as symbol, like a Jackson Pollock painting. I could trademark THAT SPATTER, but I could not under any currently known legal doctrine trademark all splatter paintings made by my clients, even if making splatter paintings happened to be part of the schtick I used to market my business.
Kinda depends, actually. While you can't trademark the process of making a splatter, and your trademark won't prevent others from making splatters of paint for their own amusement (even if it's identical to yours), your trademark would prevent somebody from using a confusingly-similar splatter to sell their goods or services. The fact that the two splatters are different when compared in detail doesn't really matter. It's more about the general impression of the "consuming public" (who are not assumed to be super bright).
What you said was that fundamental Christianity was "one of the last and greatest bastions of hatred and bigotry left in the world." That is a singularly narrow-minded position. You are saying that if all the fundamentalist Christians were gone, there would be little to no hatred or bigotry in the world. That statement is ludicrous on its face (and like I said, it reeks of bigotry---"Those evil Christians are the only bigoted people around"). There are lots of bigoted and hateful people in the world. Yes, some of them are fundamentalist Christians (though I'm not aware of any Christians who practice the Law of Moses, so any who claim Leviticus 20:13 as authority for killing gays would have to call themselves fundamentalist Jews or something). But Lots of them are also Muslims, and Jews, and Buddhists, and Hindus, and atheists, and agnostics, and liberals, and progressives, and whites, and blacks, and hispanics, and Italians, and any other group you want to pick. The point that you are missing entirely is that you are brazenly claiming not only that all fundamentalist Christians are categorically bigoted and hateful (are you seriously saying, with a straight face, that that's not a bigoted viewpoint?), but also that fundamentalist Christians have a near monopoly on hatred and bigotry. What that seems to imply is that you have an extremely narrowly-focused and irrational hatred of fundamentalist Christians that causes you to classify them all as bad, and to ascribe all (or at best, most) bad in the world to them. Now tell me again, why is that not a bigoted point of view?
Fundamentalist Christianity is, however, one of the last and greatest bastions of hatred and bigotry left in the first world.
You need to get out more. There is plenty of hatred and bigotry to go around in the world, and if all the fundamentalist Christians disappeared off the face of the earth tomorrow, that wouldn't change. In fact, that statement itself reeks of hatred and bigotry.
Well, you see, the angels had the phone box, so they had to go with the backup transportation.