Can't use the words "Olympic", "Olympiad", "Paralympic", "Paralympiad", or "Pan-American" in a trademark or to induce the sale of goods without the IOC's permission
Exceptions are made for pre-existing (before Sep 21, 1950) or for geographic references to mountains that were named before Feb 6, 1998.
At the conclusion of the Gay Games this past month in Amsterdam, an ancient question arose. Why can't the Gay Games be the Gay Olympics? Many participants seemed to be perturbed that the games were being unfairly made to refrain from the use of the word Olympic.
The answer has it's historic roots in decisions made by the resurrectors of the Olympic Games over 100 years ago. No games has been singled out or treated differently. The IOC has since it's beginnings held steadfast in it's opinion that the word Olympic be used for the Olympic Games alone, the Special Olympics being the one exception.
In 1913, Japan, China and the Philippines established a regional games which were called the "First Asian Olympic Games". The name was changed to the Far East Championships for all subsequent editions.
When Alice Milliat, the founder of the Federation Sportive Feminine International, wanted to establish events for women in 1922, she called her games the Jeux Olympiques Feminins. Pierre de Coubertin and the IAAF took notice. A compromise of sorts was agreed to. The FSFI would drop the use of the word Olympic, and the IOC would admit women into it's games.
In 1923 Frenchman Jean Petitjean was promoting his first games for university students as the University Olympic Games. De Coubertin again protested and convinced him to change the name. The International University Games were established, and are know known around the world as the World University Games, World Student Games or Universiade.
More recently the Huntsman World Senior Games were inaugurated in 1987 as the World Senior Olympics, but were made to change their name to the World Senior Games the following year.
Various Police and Fire Olympics have been asked to refrain from using the word Olympic to describe their events.
The case involving the Gay Games (International Olympic Committee vs. San Francisco Arts and Athletics, 781 F. 2d 733) was decided in January of 1986.
So what about the Special Olympics? The Special Olympics were begun by Eunice Kennedy Shriver in 1968. The use of the word Olympic by her organization was addressed by the USOC in 1971. At that time the USOC gave it's approval for the Special Olympics to be the exception to the rule and the only organization outside the Olympic movement with permission to use the word Olympic. This permission would be expanded in 1988 when the IOC recognized and endorsed the Special Olympics movement.
In this context the lawsuit between the IOC and the Gay Games in the early 80s becomes just one of many instances in which the IOC has asked organizations to reserve the use of the word Olympic for the Olympic Games.
Heck, the IOC would have huge legal fees if they had 1800 cases against the domain holders. I would think the individuals could intimidate IOC if they threatened to force IOC to bring suits against 1800 people. Which would probably force the IOC to trim the number down to just a few most important/rich/press-attention-getting domains. --
I agree, but there is a flip side to this... if voting became *too* easy, people might be inclined to vote even if they didn't really care about the issue, just because they have nothing better to do.
What if all voters were given some "voting" credits... each voter would be given the same number of voting credits. If a voter felt very strongly about an issue, s/he could use a lot of credits for that vote. For other issues that s/he didn't care much about, only one or two credits could be used.
In the end, each voter gets the same amount of influence as everyone else, but they get to express their opinions better.
A test of this could be done on Slashdot. A moderwould could be allowed to mark up a post anywhere from -0.5 points to 3.0 points. I find myself ignoring my moderator points because I don't feel that a lot of the posts are so wonderful that they should be marked up that much. Instead of having one person mark a post up 1.0 points, you could have 10 people mark it up 0.1 points. That would result in a more diverse and substantiated rating than you could get from a trigger-happy indiscriminating moderator. --
What's wrong with candidates who are near-center? The elected officials are supposed to represent the views of the average voter. I believe that it would be a mistake to have an extreme president because s/he would tend to make decisions that only 15% of the population agreed with.
OTOH, if the population were able to directly vote online, then their views wouldn't have to go through an averaging filter that removes the fringe voices. And the population wouldn't have to wait 2-4 years to have their changes in opinion heard. (hopefully those changes would be caused by eduction and deep thinking rather than mere fads...) --
I've had this idea rolling around in my head lately...
In an ideal world, producers and suppliers of goods and services would be able to know the needs of its customers as much as possible so that the products could be quickly optimized. If the companies could get this information directly from the consumer, then the rate of evolution could be faster than simply having one company wait until it realizes that its competitor is making more money from a modified version of the product.
It would also be nice if these direct customer queries were as unobtrusive as possible. Telephone surveys in the middle of dinner kinda suck.
These lead to a DoubleClick sort of idea. As I see it, the main problem with DoubleClick isn't that information is being gleaned from your private life, it's that the information can be directly traced back to you. They can claim that they will just use the information in aggregate, but we can't really believe them that they won't abuse the system.
But if they only used an anonymous version of TCP to transfer the data, then we could use technical means (personal firewalls, etc...) to make sure they're keeping their word. So we would get the best of both worlds: privacy, and better products and services. --
That would only work if the network stays static for a while. Considering the rate at which internet traffic is doubling, my hunch is that the tables would go old pretty quickly. --
Small devices like PDAs, cell phones, wrist watches, alpha two-way pagers, etc. seem to provide a fair amount of challenge and possible room for creativity with 6x6 icons and drop-down menus that take up most of the screen. --
Re:This is neither a huge surprise, nor a bad idea
on
Tripwire Going GPL
·
· Score: 3
That having been said, these sorts of tools have quite commonly become *much* better by being open source utilities
I don't mean to say that OSS is bad or anything, but I don't think your statement is necessarily substantiated.
I went to a talk given by the Tripwire author, and half the talk was about his thoughts on how tripwire relates to open source. He made a couple points (I don't remember his whole talk, sorry, it was a very good one)...
His first point was that, basically, they hadn't gotten a lot of help from the open source community (on the non-commercial version). There was one programmer who regularly sent in updates, and there were maybe 20-30 people who contributed from time to time, and then a few odd updates from other people. This was a very small percentage of the open source user base. He showed how much the opportunity cost was for openning the source. He then compared that to the price of paying his own programmers to fix bugs. He found (in his case, so this doesn't necessarily apply to anything else) that it was cheaper to keep it closed, and more bugs were found by the paid programmers. And it wasn't for lack of an audience, OSS tripwire is pretty dang popular. His opinion was that OSS lets more eyes see it, but those eyes weren't very productive, even given that not every OSS tripwire user is a coder.
Secondly, he didn't wanna piss the linux people off.
From a theoretical point of view, it depends on distance. Some need line of sight, some can go all the way through the earth. So if you're standing right next to someone, you can beam data over a laser or GHZ ranges at a much higher rate than you'd be able to do with someone on the other side of the earth.
From a practical point of view, it also depends on distance. Take, for instance, cellular phones. By using lower power transmissions, you can use a certain frequency band to send data as someone else is 100 miles away. As you decrease the size of a cell (macrocell->microcell->picocell), each individual user gets to use a higher percentage of the cell's bandwidth because there are fewer individuals. Also, there are antennas that can direct their transmissions in one direction, further multiplying the amount of usable bandwidth there is. --
Re:We hold these truths to be self-evident...
on
Napster Wars
·
· Score: 1
"[A] government of the people, by the people, for the people" -- Abraham Lincon
"Democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want, and deserve to get it good and hard." -H.L. Mencken --
Re:MP3.com once the solution, now part of the prob
on
Napster Wars
·
· Score: 2
Erm, that's not quite true. I believe the deal with the RIAA is so that MP3.com is liscenced to make internal copies for their mymp3 thingy. They might decide to release some stuff for free, but at least RIAA would get the control to say what's released and what's not.
Anyway, the settlement was only about letting MP3.com carry on with the mymp3 thingy, where the user already owns the music. Aka not free. --
From what I know, there are two goals to the USPTO:
To give an incentive to invent things. You invent something new, you get 20 years to try to profit from it. No incentive, and no one will want to invent things, right?
To bring these new inventions into public knowledge. No patents, and everyone will keep their ideas secret and everyone will be reinventing the wheel without knowing it
Slashdoters seem to feel a lot of cognitive dissonance with these ideas. Perhaps one reason is that, in the area of programming and the internet, these goals are already being accomplished without patents... through Open Source. If open source can generate a lot of very novel ideas (linux, apache...) without legislation, then patents don't seem to be very necssary. And even if patents are necessary, then only for ideas that require great amounts of thought (on par with html standards or linux), not something on the level of one-click shopping.
Patents are somewhat costly to the public; taxpayers have to fund the USPTO... competing organizations have to spend time and resources to make sure that they're not accidentally using an idea that's already patented. Therefore, patents should only be issued if they provide more advantage to the public than their cost to the public. Again, patents akin to one-click shopping don't seem to fit the bill. --
The lawsuit has nothing to do with distribution. MP3.com was licensed with the ASCAP and pays royalties to the artists through ASCAP as needed. Search google for {"mp3.com" ascap} for more on this.
If you look at the wording of the lawsuit, you'll see that the internet is hardly mentioned. And when it is, it's more of an after-the-fact... "MP3.com made illegal copies, that was wrong. Then they went and distributed them. But even if they wouldn't have distributed them, it would have been illegal.".
It's all about the fact the MP3 copied the CD's, and those copies were not determined to be "fair use", therefore, they're illegal copies. --
I am in complete disagreement with the notion that everyone should respect "the rights of the artist".
I disagree somewhat. I think that a vendor should have the right to be clueless and set prices higher than he or she would have if s/he were smarter, or to use less-than-intelligent distribution models. Being clueless doesn't seem to morally allow stealing. (OTOH, when an entire industry is clueless and they have the clout to prevent newbies from new distribution methods, then I personally think it's okay to steal from them. At least, that's my personal justification for the week).
Consider this analogy: a busker strums folk tunes on a street corner... Has he been "ripped off"? Have his artistic rights been violated?
No... he or she didn't set the stipulation that the listeners would have to pay before the song would be performed. Other artists put in extra time in the expectation that they'll get payed for the songs that they produce, and the law tells them that the government will protect their ability to get payed for each album distributed. There's no guarantee that people will want their albums though. Ideally, there should be enough good music out there that if a few vendors are clueless, then the consumers can ignore them and get their entertainment somewhere else. Again, that doesn't seem to be the case, so I'm able to sleep at night after the horrible act of theft.
I could release an album with fineprint that says "you may not listen to this music if you wear boxer shorts, nor may you distribute this music to anyone who does, because I created it, so there,"
Yes, I agree that consumers should have rights... but I don't think that consumers should be able to do anything they want to either. Hrm, I can't think of many. Mostly things like slander, theft, stuff like that. --
IANAL (and when I pretend to be, I'm often wrong (WIPTBIOW)), so feel free to give counterarguments if you think of any.
Does this hamper legitimate reverse-engineering of the product?
Before, the implementation details were not known except for inside microsoft, so if someone implemented it, it was assumed that they reverse-engineered it. If MS wanted to say that secrets were stolen from within MS, then MS had the burden of proof.
Now, the details are out in the open, but unusable. So if someone implements it now, it's up to them to prove that they used clean room reverse-engineering. Furthermore, they might have to show that those in the clean room had never seen the public-but-secret document before. --
A website could be set up that would have a list of songs and their hashes. The hash would have to be based more on the grand scheme of the specific MP3 instead of the specific bits since there are usually several different bitrate recordings out there. (does such a hash exist yet?)
I believe that such a service would be legal? You can't reconstruct the song from the hash... it seems to be about as important as the music title. --
but how do they know that the guys trading the MP3's don't actually own the CD with the tracks on it?
I beleive it's illegal to distribute them, even if you own the copy you've got. So having Napster block you from distributing that MP3 is more then fair.
Extra problem: [renaming]
Certainly, in the 335,000 songs that they found, no more than 1% are spoofed. I would say that this would require Napster to set up some sort of appeals process or something.
Granted, NOW everyone might change their songs to "Metallica (really: Hoku - Dumb Blond)" or something. But when they did the scan before, I bet most were ligit. --
Slashdot Mirror
Short synopsis:
- Can't use the words "Olympic", "Olympiad", "Paralympic", "Paralympiad", or "Pan-American" in a trademark or to induce the sale of goods without the IOC's permission
- Exceptions are made for pre-existing (before Sep 21, 1950) or for geographic references to mountains that were named before Feb 6, 1998.
This is so bizarre...--
At the conclusion of the Gay Games this past month in Amsterdam, an ancient question arose. Why can't the Gay Games be the Gay Olympics? Many participants seemed to be perturbed that the games were being unfairly made to refrain from the use of the word Olympic.
The answer has it's historic roots in decisions made by the resurrectors of the Olympic Games over 100 years ago. No games has been singled out or treated differently. The IOC has since it's beginnings held steadfast in it's opinion that the word Olympic be used for the Olympic Games alone, the Special Olympics being the one exception.
In 1913, Japan, China and the Philippines established a regional games which were called the "First Asian Olympic Games". The name was changed to the Far East Championships for all subsequent editions.
When Alice Milliat, the founder of the Federation Sportive Feminine International, wanted to establish events for women in 1922, she called her games the Jeux Olympiques Feminins. Pierre de Coubertin and the IAAF took notice. A compromise of sorts was agreed to. The FSFI would drop the use of the word Olympic, and the IOC would admit women into it's games.
In 1923 Frenchman Jean Petitjean was promoting his first games for university students as the University Olympic Games. De Coubertin again protested and convinced him to change the name. The International University Games were established, and are know known around the world as the World University Games, World Student Games or Universiade.
More recently the Huntsman World Senior Games were inaugurated in 1987 as the World Senior Olympics, but were made to change their name to the World Senior Games the following year.
Various Police and Fire Olympics have been asked to refrain from using the word Olympic to describe their events.
The case involving the Gay Games (International Olympic Committee vs. San Francisco Arts and Athletics, 781 F. 2d 733) was decided in January of 1986.
So what about the Special Olympics? The Special Olympics were begun by Eunice Kennedy Shriver in 1968. The use of the word Olympic by her organization was addressed by the USOC in 1971. At that time the USOC gave it's approval for the Special Olympics to be the exception to the rule and the only organization outside the Olympic movement with permission to use the word Olympic. This permission would be expanded in 1988 when the IOC recognized and endorsed the Special Olympics movement.
In this context the lawsuit between the IOC and the Gay Games in the early 80s becomes just one of many instances in which the IOC has asked organizations to reserve the use of the word Olympic for the Olympic Games.
--
Heck, the IOC would have huge legal fees if they had 1800 cases against the domain holders. I would think the individuals could intimidate IOC if they threatened to force IOC to bring suits against 1800 people. Which would probably force the IOC to trim the number down to just a few most important/rich/press-attention-getting domains.
--
A review of the MPTrip says that it won't play MP3's that exceed a 196Kbps rate... That probably means no VBR either.
--
What if all voters were given some "voting" credits... each voter would be given the same number of voting credits. If a voter felt very strongly about an issue, s/he could use a lot of credits for that vote. For other issues that s/he didn't care much about, only one or two credits could be used.
In the end, each voter gets the same amount of influence as everyone else, but they get to express their opinions better.
A test of this could be done on Slashdot. A moderwould could be allowed to mark up a post anywhere from -0.5 points to 3.0 points. I find myself ignoring my moderator points because I don't feel that a lot of the posts are so wonderful that they should be marked up that much. Instead of having one person mark a post up 1.0 points, you could have 10 people mark it up 0.1 points. That would result in a more diverse and substantiated rating than you could get from a trigger-happy indiscriminating moderator.
--
What's wrong with candidates who are near-center? The elected officials are supposed to represent the views of the average voter. I believe that it would be a mistake to have an extreme president because s/he would tend to make decisions that only 15% of the population agreed with.
OTOH, if the population were able to directly vote online, then their views wouldn't have to go through an averaging filter that removes the fringe voices. And the population wouldn't have to wait 2-4 years to have their changes in opinion heard. (hopefully those changes would be caused by eduction and deep thinking rather than mere fads...)
--
I hereby give Slashdot the right to remove my previous post.
--
So what happens when a person speaks out against a company that is willing and supposedly able to quash dissent... err, I mean, lies?
--
In an ideal world, producers and suppliers of goods and services would be able to know the needs of its customers as much as possible so that the products could be quickly optimized. If the companies could get this information directly from the consumer, then the rate of evolution could be faster than simply having one company wait until it realizes that its competitor is making more money from a modified version of the product.
It would also be nice if these direct customer queries were as unobtrusive as possible. Telephone surveys in the middle of dinner kinda suck.
These lead to a DoubleClick sort of idea. As I see it, the main problem with DoubleClick isn't that information is being gleaned from your private life, it's that the information can be directly traced back to you. They can claim that they will just use the information in aggregate, but we can't really believe them that they won't abuse the system.
But if they only used an anonymous version of TCP to transfer the data, then we could use technical means (personal firewalls, etc...) to make sure they're keeping their word. So we would get the best of both worlds: privacy, and better products and services.
--
That would only work if the network stays static for a while. Considering the rate at which internet traffic is doubling, my hunch is that the tables would go old pretty quickly.
--
Small devices like PDAs, cell phones, wrist watches, alpha two-way pagers, etc. seem to provide a fair amount of challenge and possible room for creativity with 6x6 icons and drop-down menus that take up most of the screen.
--
I don't mean to say that OSS is bad or anything, but I don't think your statement is necessarily substantiated.
I went to a talk given by the Tripwire author, and half the talk was about his thoughts on how tripwire relates to open source. He made a couple points (I don't remember his whole talk, sorry, it was a very good one)...
His first point was that, basically, they hadn't gotten a lot of help from the open source community (on the non-commercial version). There was one programmer who regularly sent in updates, and there were maybe 20-30 people who contributed from time to time, and then a few odd updates from other people. This was a very small percentage of the open source user base. He showed how much the opportunity cost was for openning the source. He then compared that to the price of paying his own programmers to fix bugs. He found (in his case, so this doesn't necessarily apply to anything else) that it was cheaper to keep it closed, and more bugs were found by the paid programmers. And it wasn't for lack of an audience, OSS tripwire is pretty dang popular. His opinion was that OSS lets more eyes see it, but those eyes weren't very productive, even given that not every OSS tripwire user is a coder.
Secondly, he didn't wanna piss the linux people off.
Guess which point won out?
--
From a practical point of view, it also depends on distance. Take, for instance, cellular phones. By using lower power transmissions, you can use a certain frequency band to send data as someone else is 100 miles away. As you decrease the size of a cell (macrocell->microcell->picocell), each individual user gets to use a higher percentage of the cell's bandwidth because there are fewer individuals. Also, there are antennas that can direct their transmissions in one direction, further multiplying the amount of usable bandwidth there is.
--
There's a good summary of the procedure here: Secret Ballot Election on Computer Network.
--
"Democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want, and deserve to get it good and hard." -H.L. Mencken
--
Anyway, the settlement was only about letting MP3.com carry on with the mymp3 thingy, where the user already owns the music. Aka not free.
--
On the other hand, "it's" is not.
--
FDLFBMS Friends Don't Let Freinds Buy MicroSoft
--
Slashdoters seem to feel a lot of cognitive dissonance with these ideas. Perhaps one reason is that, in the area of programming and the internet, these goals are already being accomplished without patents... through Open Source. If open source can generate a lot of very novel ideas (linux, apache...) without legislation, then patents don't seem to be very necssary. And even if patents are necessary, then only for ideas that require great amounts of thought (on par with html standards or linux), not something on the level of one-click shopping.
Patents are somewhat costly to the public; taxpayers have to fund the USPTO... competing organizations have to spend time and resources to make sure that they're not accidentally using an idea that's already patented. Therefore, patents should only be issued if they provide more advantage to the public than their cost to the public. Again, patents akin to one-click shopping don't seem to fit the bill.
--
The lawsuit has nothing to do with distribution. MP3.com was licensed with the ASCAP and pays royalties to the artists through ASCAP as needed. Search google for {"mp3.com" ascap} for more on this.
If you look at the wording of the lawsuit, you'll see that the internet is hardly mentioned. And when it is, it's more of an after-the-fact... "MP3.com made illegal copies, that was wrong. Then they went and distributed them. But even if they wouldn't have distributed them, it would have been illegal.".
It's all about the fact the MP3 copied the CD's, and those copies were not determined to be "fair use", therefore, they're illegal copies.
--
I disagree somewhat. I think that a vendor should have the right to be clueless and set prices higher than he or she would have if s/he were smarter, or to use less-than-intelligent distribution models. Being clueless doesn't seem to morally allow stealing. (OTOH, when an entire industry is clueless and they have the clout to prevent newbies from new distribution methods, then I personally think it's okay to steal from them. At least, that's my personal justification for the week).
Consider this analogy: a busker strums folk tunes on a street corner... Has he been "ripped off"? Have his artistic rights been violated?
No... he or she didn't set the stipulation that the listeners would have to pay before the song would be performed. Other artists put in extra time in the expectation that they'll get payed for the songs that they produce, and the law tells them that the government will protect their ability to get payed for each album distributed. There's no guarantee that people will want their albums though. Ideally, there should be enough good music out there that if a few vendors are clueless, then the consumers can ignore them and get their entertainment somewhere else. Again, that doesn't seem to be the case, so I'm able to sleep at night after the horrible act of theft.
I could release an album with fineprint that says "you may not listen to this music if you wear boxer shorts, nor may you distribute this music to anyone who does, because I created it, so there,"
Yes, I agree that consumers should have rights... but I don't think that consumers should be able to do anything they want to either. Hrm, I can't think of many. Mostly things like slander, theft, stuff like that.
--
Does this hamper legitimate reverse-engineering of the product?
Before, the implementation details were not known except for inside microsoft, so if someone implemented it, it was assumed that they reverse-engineered it. If MS wanted to say that secrets were stolen from within MS, then MS had the burden of proof.
Now, the details are out in the open, but unusable. So if someone implements it now, it's up to them to prove that they used clean room reverse-engineering. Furthermore, they might have to show that those in the clean room had never seen the public-but-secret document before.
--
I believe that such a service would be legal? You can't reconstruct the song from the hash... it seems to be about as important as the music title.
--
I beleive it's illegal to distribute them, even if you own the copy you've got. So having Napster block you from distributing that MP3 is more then fair.
Extra problem: [renaming]
Certainly, in the 335,000 songs that they found, no more than 1% are spoofed. I would say that this would require Napster to set up some sort of appeals process or something.
Granted, NOW everyone might change their songs to "Metallica (really: Hoku - Dumb Blond)" or something. But when they did the scan before, I bet most were ligit.
--
Integrals? Cross products? It's not even that hard... it's just 0's, 1's, and nand's.
--