What's kind of stunning about this, aside from the moral injustice of this being yet another law that grants corporations more legal protections than actual human beings, is that the corporations who are the most gung-ho about securing copyrights and trademarks on everything, as well as preserving them into eternity, seem not to get that, in a post-Internet era, trying to protect their brands forever, literally, is essentially The New Prohibition, in that it's objectively unenforceable and everyone hates it except for the very small cadre of folks whose interests it serves.
The only moral or economic justification for such laws is if they reward people for CREATING things, by ensuring that those creations can't just be ripped off by anyone and everyone else, to the point that there's no incentive left to create, but if and when Disney can acquire trademark on a branch of the United States military, without those service members seeing dime one of the profits hat will be made? Then, much like Jack Kirby and Bill Finger getting screwed out of their proper rewards, that instead PUNISHES those individuals for doing THE ACTUAL WORK, while rewarding corporations who should, by all rights, be held in contempt as being even worse than the "parasites" that Ayn Rand railed against in her shitty fanfic. Then again, Disney made most of its classic movies by waiting for other people's stories to pass into the public domain, so I shouldn't be surprised.
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Date: 25/5/11 17:55 (UTC)The only moral or economic justification for such laws is if they reward people for CREATING things, by ensuring that those creations can't just be ripped off by anyone and everyone else, to the point that there's no incentive left to create, but if and when Disney can acquire trademark on a branch of the United States military, without those service members seeing dime one of the profits hat will be made? Then, much like Jack Kirby and Bill Finger getting screwed out of their proper rewards, that instead PUNISHES those individuals for doing THE ACTUAL WORK, while rewarding corporations who should, by all rights, be held in contempt as being even worse than the "parasites" that Ayn Rand railed against in her shitty fanfic. Then again, Disney made most of its classic movies by waiting for other people's stories to pass into the public domain, so I shouldn't be surprised.